House of Leaves (59 page)

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We’ll pay you

to lofe weight!

I actually had a good laugh over that one. You want to lofe weight, I thought to myfeif, well boy do I have something for you to read.

I threw some old clothes in the back and slipped the rifle and the two guns under the seats. Moft of the ammo I hid in socks which I tucked infide the spare tire.

The laft week has been particularly funny, though not at all, I affure you, funny. Everywhere the jacarandas are bloffoming. People go around faying how beautiful they are. Me, they only unsettle, filling me with dread and now, strangely enough, a faint sense of fury. As foon as I finifh this note, I plan to load the book and everything elfe into that old black trunk and drag it down to a ftorage unit I rented in Culver city for a couple hundred bucks. Then I’m gone. I’m sorry I didn’t get farther than this. Who knows what I’ll find back eaft, maybe fleep, maybe a calm, hopefully the path to quiet the fea, this fea, my fea.

Likewife we muft also believe or elfe in the name of the Lorde take charge of the Knowledge that we are all dead men.

20 Janiuere, 1610

More fnow. Bitter cold. This is a terrible Place we have stumbled on. It has been a Week fince we haue fpied one living thing. Were it not for the ftorm we would have abandoned it. Verm was plagued by many bad Dreames last night.

21 Janiuere, 1610

The ftorm will not break. Verm went out to hunt but returned within the houre. The Wind makes a wicked found in the Woods. Ftrange as it muft feem, Tiggs, Verm, and I take comfort in the found. I fear much more the filence here. Verm tellf me he dreamt of Bones last night. I dreame of the Sunne.

22 Janiuere, 1610

We are dying. No food. No theker. Tiggs dreamt he faw all fnow about us turn Red with blood.

And then the last entry:

23 Janiuere, 1610

Ftaires! We haue found ftaires! [400—
Jamestown Colony Papers: The Tiggs, Verm & I Diary
(Lacuna Library founded by The National Heritage
Society)
v. xxiii. n. 139, January 1610, p. 18-25.]

Nowhere in Lord De la Waif’s personal journals is there a mention of stairs or any clue about what might have happened to the third body. Warr, however, does refer to the journal as a clear example of death’s madness and in a separate letter consigns the delicate relic to the flames. Fortunately the order, for whatever reason, was not carried out and the journal survived, winding up in a Boston book store with only Warr’s name to link the fragile yellow pages to this continent’s heritage.

Nevertheless, while the journal may offer some proof that NavIdson’s extraordinary property existed almost four hundred years ago, why that particular location [401—The exact location of the house has been subject to a great deal of speculation. Many feel it belongs somewhere in the environs of Richmond. However Ray X. Lawlor, English professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, places Ash Tree Lane “closer to California Crossroads. Certainly not far from Colonial Williamsburg and the original Jamestown colony. South of Lake Powell but most assuredly northwest of Bacons Castle.” See Lawlor’s “Which Side of the James?” in Zyzzyva, fall 1996, p. 187.] proved so significant remains unanswered. In
1995,
parapsychologist Lucinda S. Hausmaninger claimed that Navidson’s place was analogous to the blind spot created by the optic nerve in the retina:

“It is a place of processing, of sense-making, of seeing.” [402—Lucinda S. Hausmaninger’s “Oh Say Can You See” in
The Richmond Lag Zine,
v. 119, April 1995, p. 33.] However, she soon altered this supposition, describing it as “the omphalos of all e are.” [403—Lucinda S. Hausmaninger’s “The Navy Navel” in
San Clemente Prang Vibe,
v. 4, winter 1996, p. vii.] It did not matter that the house existed in Virginia, only that it existed in one place: “One place, one (eventual) meaning.” [404—Ibid., p. viii.] Of course recent discoveries shatter both of Hausmaninger’s theories. [405—See Appendix C.
—
Ed.]

As everyone knows, instead of delving into the question of location or the history of the Jamestown Colony,
The Navidson Record
focuses on Alicia Rosenbaum in her dingy little office talking to Karen about her troubles. It may very well be the best response of all: tea, comfort, and social intercourse. Perhaps Rosenbaum’s conclusion is even the best: “lord knows why but no one ever seems comfortable staying there,” as if to imply in a larger way that there are some places in this world which no one will ever possess or inhabit.

Karen may hate the house but she needs Navidson. When the video tape flickers back to life, it is 9:30 P.M. and Ash Tree Lane is dark. Alicia Rosenbaum waits in her car, engine idling, headlights plastering the front door.

Slowly Karen makes her way up the walk, her shadow falling across the door step. For a moment she fumbles with her keys. There is the brief click of teeth on pins in the heart of the dead bolt and then the door swings open. In the foyer, we can see almost six months of mail strewn on the floor, surrounded by wisps of dust.

Karen’s breathing increases: “I don’t know if I can do this” (then shouting) “Navy! Navy, are you in there?!” But when she finally locates the light switch and discovers the power has been turned off— “Oh shit. No way
— “ —
she backs out of the house and into a jarring jump cut which returns us again to the front of the house, this time without Alicia Rosenbaum, evening now replaced by beady sunlight. April 10th, 11:27
PM.
Everything is green, pleasant, and starting to bloom. Karen has avoided the B-movie cliché of choosing evening as the time to explore a dangerous house. Of course real horror does not depend upon the melodrama of shadows or even the conspiracies of night.

Once again Karen unlocks the front door and tries the switch. This time a flood of electric light indicates all is well with the power company. “Thank you Edison,” Karen murmurs, sunshine and electricity steeling her resolve.

The first thing she points the Hi 8 at are the infamous bookshelves upstairs. They are flush with the walls. Furthermore, as Reston also reported, the closet space has vanished. Finally, she goes back down to the living room, preparing to face the horror which we might imagine still reaches out of her past like a claw. She approaches the door on the north wall. Perhaps she hopes Reston has locked it and taken the keys, but as she discovers soon enough, the door opens effortlessly.

Still, there is no infernal corridor. No lightless and lifeless place. There is only a closet barely a foot and a half deep with white walls, a strip of molding, and all of it slashed from ceiling to floor with daylight streaming in through the windows behind her.

Karen actually laughs but her laughter comes up short. Her only hope of finding Navidson had been to confront what terrified her most. Now without a reason to be afraid, Karen suddenly finds herself without a reason to hope.

After spending the first few nights at the Days Inn, Karen decides to move back into the house. Reston visits her periodically, and each time he comes they go over every alcove and corner looking for some sign of Navidson. They never find anything. Reston offers to stay there with her but Karen says she actually wants to be alone. He looks noticeably relieved when she insists on seeing him to his van.

The following week, Alicia Rosenbaum starts bringing by prospective buyers. A couple of newlyweds seems especially taken by the place. “It’s so cute” responds the pregnant wife.” Small but especially charming,” adds the husband. After they leave, Karen tells Rosenbaum she has changed her mind and will at least for the time being still hold onto the house.

Every morning and evening, she calls Daisy and Chad on her cellular phone. At first they want to know if she is with their father, but soon they stop asking. Karen spends the rest of her day writing in a journal. As she has turned back on all the wall mounted Hi 8s and kept them resupplied with fresh tapes, there is ample footage of her hard at work at this task, filling page after page, just as she sometimes fills the house with peals of laughter or now and then the broken notes of a cry.

Though she eventually uses up the entire volume, not one word is ever visible in
The Navidson Record
.
To this day the contents of her journal remain a mystery. Professor Cora Minehart M.S., Ph.D. argues that the actual words are irrelevant: “process outweighs product.” [
406—Cora Minehart’s
Recovery:
Methods
and
Manner
with an
introduction by Patricia B. Nesseiroade
(New York: AMACOM Books, 1994), p. 11.]
Others, however, have gone to great lengths to suggest a miraculous and secret history enfolded within those pages.
[407—See Darren Meen’s
GatherEd
God
(New York
Hyperion, I
995)
and Lynn Rembold’s
Stations of
Eleven
(Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996).] Katherine Dunn is rumoured to have invented her own version of Karen’s journal.

Karen, however, does not restrict her activities to just writing. She frequently retreats outside where she works on the garden, weeding, clipping, and even planting. We often find her singing quietly to herself, anything from popular tunes, old Slavic lullabies, to a song about how many ways her life has changed and how she would like to get her feet back on the ground.

It seems that the most significant observations concerning this segment concern Karen’s smile. There is no question it has changed. Lester T. Ochs has traced its evolving shape from Karen’s days as a cover girl, through the months spent living at the house, the prolonged separation in New York, to her eventual return to the house:

Whether on the cover of
Glamour
or
Vogue,
Karen never failed to form her lips into those faultlessly symmetrical curves, parted just enough to coyly remark on her barely hidden teeth, so perfectly poised between shadow and light, always guaranteed to spark fantasies of further interiority. No matter which magazine she appeared in, she always produced the same creation over and over again. Even after they moved to Ash Tree Lane, Karen still offered up the same art to whomever she encountered. The house, however, changed that. It deconstructed her smile until by the time they had escaped she had no smile at all.

Then further on:

By the time she returned to Virginia, some expression of joy and relief, albeit rare, was also returning. The big difference though was that now her smile was completely unmannered. The curve of each lip no longer mirrored the other. The interplay was harmonic, enacting a ceaseless dance of comment and compliment, revealing or entirely concealing her teeth, one smile often containing a hundred. Her expression was no longer a frozen structure but a melody which for the first time accurately reflected how she was feeling inside. [
408—Lester T. Ochs’
Smile
(Middletown, CT: University Press of New England’ Wesleyan University Press, 1996), p. 87-91.]

This of course responds to the extraordinary moment on the evening of May 4th, when surrounded by candles, Karen suddenly beams brighter than she has before, running her hands through her hair, almost laughing, only to
cover her face a few moments later, her shoulders shaking as she
starts to weep.
Her reactions seem entirely
unmotivated
until the following morning when she offers a startling revelation.

“He’s still alive,” she tells Reston over the phone. “I heard
him
last night. I couldn’t understand what he
said.
But I know I heard
his
voice.”

Reston arrives the next
day and
stays until midnight, never hearing a thing. He
seems
more
than
a little
concerned
about Karen’s mental health.

“If he is still in there Karen,” Reston says quietly. “He’s
been
there for over a month. I
can’t see
how there’s
any
way he could survive.”

But a few hours
after
Reston leaves, Karen smiles again,
apparently
catching somewhere
inside
her
the
faint voice of Navidson. This happens over
and
over again, whether late at night or in the
middle
of the day. Sometimes Karen calls out to him, sometimes she just wanders from room to room, pushing her ear against walls or floors. Then on the
afternoon
of May lOw, she finds in the children’s
bedroom,
born out of
nowhere,
Navidson’s clothes,
remnants
of his pack and sleeping bag,
and scattered
across the
floor,
from corner to corner, cartridges of film, boxes of 16mm,
and easily
a dozen video
tapes.

She
immediately
calls Reston and tells him
what
has
happened, asking
him to drive over as soon as he can. Then she
locates an
AC
adapter,
plugs in a Hi 8 and begins rewinding one of the newly discovered tapes.

The angle
from
the room mounted camcorder does not
provide a
view of her Hi 8 screen. Only Karen’s
face
is visible. Unfortunately, for some reason, she is also slightly out of focus. In
fact
the only thing in focus is the
wall behind
her where some of Daisy
and
Chad’s drawings still hang. The shot lasts an uncomfortable fifteen seconds, until abruptly that immutable surface disappears. In less
than a blink, the white wall
along with the drawings
secured
with yellowing
scotch
tape vanishes into an
inky
black.

Since Karen faces the opposite direction, she fails to notice the change.
Instead
her attention remains fixed on the Hi 8 which has just
finished
rewinding the tape. But even as she pushes play, the yawn of
dark
does not waver. In
fact
it almost seems to be
waiting
for her, for the moment when she
will finally divert
her attention from the
tiny screen and
catch sight of the hoffor looming up
behind
her, which of course is
exactly
what she does do when she
fmds
out that the video
tape
shows.