The House on Black Lake (13 page)

“T
HE FOUNDING FATHERS OF
M
ONTREAL SETTLED RIGHT HERE ON
this street.” Ruth makes a quick turn onto an avenue lined with towering iron fences and small forests of sycamore trees protecting the mansions from view. Only rooftops are visible from the street, some featuring turrets and gables.

“Most made their fortunes in banking, the fur trade, and railroads. The Sandeley’s built one of the first houses, and this is the very place where Ramey grew up.

“Our house is one of the new ones on the block.”

A wrought-iron gate, centered with an S, opens and she brings the car to a halt in front of a palatial structure with porticos, balustrades, and dormered windows. I follow Ruth into a foyer with a magnificent sweeping staircase featuring a gargantuan mirror hung at the first landing. High above the stairwell, a mushroom chandelier throws off prisms of color that cascade down the pastel blue walls.

“It looks like you could walk through the glass into another world,” I say.

“I
have
almost walked through it, after a few too many cocktails,” Ruth says with a chuckle, as we enter a humid hallway inlaid with diamond-cut marble. One side of the expansive corridor looks into a verdant greenhouse, with plants slithering up the damp walls to the luminance of the glass ceiling. Skylights infuse the hall with streams of warm sunlight.

“The house has twenty-five rooms. In the old days, the master’s bedroom was his domain. The mistress had her own chamber, where she could sleep in peace after she got laid by the old goat. Great idea, eh? Our designer fashioned our bedrooms after the boudoirs of King Louis and Marie Antoinette in Versailles. He even placed replicas of their platform shoes and wigs on stands in our walk-in closets. My favorite wig is the one with the bird’s nest. Ramey’s closet is more elaborate than mine, with racks twirling at the touch of a button. He is quite the clotheshorse. You would never guess since he is such a slob at the lake, but he wears sport coats and suits for work and rarely wears anything more than once. A flaming queen from the chicest store in town stops by once a month to replenish the stock.

“You should have seen the look on his face when he returned from a business trip and walked into his bedroom. He’s having it redesigned in the style of the lord of the manor. Since he’s into rough sex, it’s probably better to get rid of all that lace. I’m keeping my room as it is—it’s great for girlie chats and role-playing. My favorite is to be raped wearing crinolines and a full bustle on a Sunday afternoon after high tea.

“The kitchen is modeled after our favorite restaurant in Paris. The rocks come from the Yangtze,” Ruth says as we enter a spectacular room fitted with top-of-the-line appliances and culinary gadgets.

“Ramey and I do a lot of entertaining and hold fundraisers here, so I had it enlarged to accommodate a big staff. Last Christmas we flew in the head chef from the restaurant and had him recreate his most famous ten-course meal. The gala was attended by celebrities and politicos from all over the country. The press got shots of Ramey in the arms of a well-known seductress, which sold a lot of papers and created a load of gossip amongst the old blue bloods. But, truth is, I was the one she was after that night.”

“It’s stunning.”

“The cabinets are stained with a unique color my painter concocted for me. He calls it Cinnamon Raisin. He’s a hot little cinnamon raisin himself, with a great ass.” Ruth walks to a counter, picks up a wicker basket filled with limes, throws them into the sink and flips on the garbage disposal.

“Michelangelo’s David was carved from the same marble as the countertops; he came from the same quarry in Tuscany.

“Let me show you outside.”

She opens French doors and we walk out onto magnificent grounds, with multilevel landscaping surrounding a pool with water cascading into a double-tiered lagoon. A statue of Neptune, pitchfork in hand, regurgitates water from his open mouth into a second pond where a reclining mermaid holds a crescent shell.

“The lighting in the pool house is natural; there is no electricity. The fixtures are unique; the fluorescent pieces were extracted from deep inside underwater caves.”

We follow a slate path up to a pool house built in the shape of an igloo, with stacked half-circle windows. As we approach, fog misters send out clouds of refreshing dew to swirl around our feet. Spanning out from the domed structure, tables and chairs, carved from chunks of granite and covered with plump navy-blue cushions, straddle a brook trickling down cobblestone steps to an aquamarine grotto teaming with fish. The grotto is flanked by beds of stone laid out with stacked logs and tall bamboo torches. Beyond, there is the infinity of blue sky and the lulling sound of water streaming down to the pool below.

“Hello beautiful,” someone calls out. Ruth laughs as I look around me to see who is calling.

“That’s Rocky.” She points up to a lofty thatched tree house with a crude gangplank connecting it to a smaller fort. The conjoined hut has been designed as a makeshift observatory, with windows cut out and lined with varied sizes and shapes of metal telescopes. “Not a bad roost for a parrot, eh?”

She plucks a stem of cherries from an overhead branch. “It’s a special hybrid, as sweet and juicy as you will ever taste,” she says, and hands me the fruit.

“Delicious. You’ve got your own serenity garden,” I say as a hummingbird flits past me to peck at one of the small pouches dangling from strips of leather tied to the tree house.

“The slate used for the decks and pathways was mined from a quarry Ramey’s dad owned in India. He owned other mines in Africa, or is it Australia? Anyway, it’s one of those third-world countries with nasty insects and stinky primitives. I guess all the mines are ours now, since his dad’s passed on. I have zero knowledge of any of the business dealings—that’s Ramey’s domain. It’s all pretty hush-hush because of the wacky politics.”

She stops for a moment to pick rotting blossoms from a thorny rose bush lining the path leading back to the house.

“His dad was something of a mad scientist with a doomsday obsession. He believed the earth was in danger of imminent extinction, either man-made or natural. He traveled the globe, searching for hide-outs and resources to survive in case he had to go native. When Ramey was a child, his father would disappear for weeks at a time, living in the wild. He taught him everything he knew about survival. His dad told me he wanted his son brought up to be both a gentleman and savage man. Ramey’s tendency is to lean toward the latter category. A heart attack got the old man in the end.

“We’ll take the elevator downstairs. I need to get some towels and cotton blankets for the lake house.” I follow Ruth through the kitchen to a narrow shaft set into the corner.

“Ramey had a complete workout studio built downstairs,” she says, pushing a brass button. “He is a bit obsessed with his body, but trust me I’m not complaining. His ass is so hard you can flip a quarter on it and call heads or tails. It’s a nutcracker.

“The doors near the back windows lead to a sauna, steam, and a massage room,” she says as we step from the elevator into an area resembling an exclusive health club. “It sounds like the maids left the water running in one of the baths. I let them use the equipment after work when we’re not here. All the machines are the newest models. Take a spin on the Ryccho.” She motions to a lineup of stationary cycles at the end of the room. “I’ll be right back.”

I weave my way through an army of exercise machines to a replica of a fancy motorcycle. I am about to mount the seat when I notice a golden handle set into the wall in front of me, with mysterious-looking geometric symbols etched into its surface. The latch is mounted to a door nearly hidden in the surface of the wall. Moving to examine the handle, I see it is adorned with a series of overlapping concentric circles with an arrow piercing through the center. I pull down on the lever and it opens smoothly, releasing a blast of warm, stale air.

“No!” I hear Ruth call from behind me. “You can’t go in there. It’s Ramey’s private room.”

But, it is too late: the door is already open and I have switched on the light. Hanging from the ceiling is a skeleton of some horrible perversion of nature, dangling with another smaller version of something even more wretched. And there is more—too much to comprehend in a moment. Ramey’s room is a chamber of curiosities, a fantastical and bizarre collection of ancient and other-worldly artifacts.

“The room is a catastrophe—not fit for human eyes. It’s unusual for him to leave it unlocked,” Ruth says, coming up from behind me. “Now you’ve seen Ramey’s little hobby, his secret obsession, his father’s legacy. Come, before the awful sight begins to haunt you at night. We need to get back to the lake; it’s getting very late.” Ruth turns off the light and closes the door to Ramey’s secret room.

W
E’RE DINING AT
U
NCLE
R
OGER’S ESTATE TONIGHT
. T
HERE WAS A
men’s club meeting today and some of the boys are staying for dinner. I tried to get out of it, but no one refuses an invitation from Ramey’s uncle.” Ruth’s eyes blink rapidly as she speaks. She reaches into the glove box and retrieves a sunglass case, takes the glasses out, puts them on, takes them back off, replaces them in the case and returns it to the compartment.

In the drowsy silence I watch the countryside melt into a haze of sun falling on stalks of grain. Up the road, a clapboard farmhouse with green shutters sits at the end of a long drive. Horses and cows graze idly in the pasture surrounding the house near the barn. To the right of the property, a burly man in a horse buggy whips a lean thoroughbred around an oval racetrack surrounded by a whitewashed fence.

“When I was a little girl I used to sit on the fence at my grandfather’s farm and watch the neighbor’s horse and buggy races—”

The car suddenly lurches to the right and then careens off the road.

“Stop the car, stop the car, Ruth!”

I lean over to grasp the steering wheel, but her hands are stiff and unyielding. “Stop the car!” I fight for control of the vehicle as we head straight down a slope towards an enormous tree.

“The brakes! Hit the brakes!” I cover my face with my hands and am thrust forward in a gut-splitting lurch, then whiplashed back against the seat, as the vehicle slams to a halt. Through my fingers I look out the front window, beyond swirling dust, at the trunk of the tree—its bark broken by the vehicle’s front bumper.

“Ruth, my God, what happened?”

She sits rigid, with a frozen stare, and her skin is covered with ugly red blotches.

“What’s wrong?” I ask in a shallow whisper.

I want to comfort my friend, but there is something disconcerting about the angle of her neck.

“Please talk to me. I don’t understand—”