The House That Jack Built (10 page)

    'See this floor?' said Norman, darting the flashlight right and left. 'Canadian maple… best possible dancing floor you could find. It actually springs when you step on it.'

    Craig kept turning around and around, looking up at the pillars and the gallery and the decorated ceiling. 'Isn't it amazing?' he breathed. 'You can almost imagine the music. You can almost see people dancing.'

    'This room doesn't need anything more than a cleanup,' Norman remarked. He peered at a small scabrous patch on one of the walls, and then prodded it with his finger. 'There's some damp coming through, but you could soon fix that.'

    Craig took Effie in his arms and danced three or four steps of a waltz with her. Outside, the skies were beginning to clear, and the first wash of sunlight lit the ballroom windows, and formed patterns on the floor. Craig said, 'Mr. and Mrs. Craig T. Bellman request the pleasure of your company at a grand summer ball. Dress: amazing, if you please. Supper at ten, breakfast at four, carriages at six.'

    'You're mad,' laughed Effie.

    'Mad? Me? I'll buy the house Monday and have the invitations printed by the end of next week.'

    'Let me show you the kitchens,' said Norman, switching off his flashlight. 'The kitchens aren't haunted.'

    Two more rooms led off the ballroom: a huge morning-room with french windows overlooking the gardens; and a derelict room that might once have been a library. The ceiling had partially collapsed, and the plaster on the walls was bulging with damp, like leprosy sores. The flooring was covered with damp grey sheets, and it must have been water-damaged, and warped, because it rattled under their feet as they walked across it, as if they were wearing clogs.

    They reached another wide staircase. Effie went halfway up it to have a look. It led up to a large, high-ceilinged landing, with clerestory windows all around it. When it was built it must have been airy and bright, but most of the windows were obscured with grime, and water had penetrated one side of the landing, creating a hunched figure out of fungus and diseased plaster. It even seemed to have one dripping eye, this figure - glaring at Effie from underneath a heavy elephant-man forehead of bulging moss.

    'The water's got in pretty bad all around this side of the house,' Norman remarked. 'There's a whole area of flat roofing that's been leaking since the house was built. These days, it's just got worse, that's all, and most of the north-facing bedrooms need new ceilings and new floors.'

    'How much?' asked Effie, holding Craig's arm.

    'One point seven-five, give or take. That's if you want it to look something like the way it did when it was first constructed.'

    'You mean one and three quarters of a million dollars?'

    'Give or take.'

    'I don't think I need to see the kitchens.'

    'Come on, they're like really interesting. They have all the original equipment, in amazing condition. An Elkay sink, a Westinghouse icebox.'

    'Norman,' Effie interrupted him, 'I'm sure the kitchens are very interesting, but if it's going to cost one and three quarters of a million dollars just to stop the rain from coming in, we'll just have to say thank you but no thank you.'

    'Come on, sweetheart,' Craig cajoled her. 'There's no harm in looking.'

    'Well, I don't want to look. If we're rich enough to buy a house like this, we're rich enough to have servants. You don't think this Jack Belias ever visited the kitchens, do you?'

    'It's pretty historical,' said Norman. 'An original 1929 kitchen, in showroom condition.'

    'You mean an antique kitchen that's going to cost half-a-million dollars to renovate?'

    Norman chewed on his hair. 'I guess that's one way of putting it. But I know a guy in Newburgh who puts in brilliant imported kitchens at fantastically low prices. You like Neff? He can do Neff for practically nothing.'

    He took hold of Craig's elbow, and led him across the hallway to the kitchens. Effie thought: oh well, I guess it's historical, I guess I ought to be interested, and she was just about to follow them when she thought she heard something.

    She stopped, and listened, looking up towards the landing where the dripping moss-creature stood. Norman was still talking to Craig, explaining how Elkay's 1929-model Butler's Pantry sinks came in copper, nickel, white metal, crodon plate or monel metal, and how- They pushed their way through the squeaking kitchen door, and it swung closed behind them. Effie stayed where she was, straining her ears.

    The wind was still moaning through the broken windows; and thunder still crumpled in the distance. But she was sure that she could hear a woman sobbing.

    She hesitated, then she took two or three steps up the staircase, and listened again.

    She was sure she could hear it. The low, agonised cries of a woman who was really desperate, really in pain. It was very far away, in one of the upper bedrooms, but there was no mistaking it.

    She turned around and called, 'Craig!'

    There was no answer, so she went to the kitchen door and pushed it open. The cream-decorated kitchen was deserted, although the door to the cellar was ajar. Presumably Norman had taken Craig down below to see Valhalla's boilers.

    'Craig!' she called, but there was still no reply.

    She waited for a moment, then she went back to the hallway. She listened and listened and she could still hear it, that terrible agonised sobbing.

    She started to climb the stairs.

    

    

    She held onto the banister rail as she climbed, because some of the stairs were darkly rotted where water had been pouring down the wall. Three-quarters of the way up, one of the stairs lurched downward an inch, and Effie heard nails pulling out of old, pulpy wood. She hesitated for a moment, holding her breath, not sure if she ought to continue.

    But then she heard that anguished sobbing again; and it seemed much nearer. Whoever it was, she couldn't leave her. She sounded so much in pain.

    Effie reached the top of the stairs. The landing was covered with a thin, rucked-up carpet. It had once been yellow, and patterned with flowers, but now it was water-stained and faded to the colour of old skin. On the opposite side of the landing, the grey-green figure of leprous plaster watched her with its single rheumy eye. She stared back at it, defying it to move, and of course it didn't; but there was still something horribly animate about it, as if it were brooding with deep resentment about its own hideous face, like the Elephant Man.

    Two corridors led away from this landing: one to her left, to the bedrooms over the kitchens - the other to her right. But directly beside her, another staircase led up to Valhalla's third storey.

    She paused, and listened, and it seemed as if this was where the sobbing was coming from: somewhere in the half-collapsed roof.

    She heard a door banging downstairs, and she turned back and called out, 'Craig?' hoping that he had finished his tour of the cellars. But it was only the library door, banging in the wind that blew in through the broken windows.

    The sobbing had become almost a mewling now, an endless self-pitying litany of indistinguishable words. Although she held her breath so that she could hear better, Effie still couldn't make out what the woman was crying about. She went to the foot of the second staircase, and held onto the decorative newel post. Halfway up the staircase there was a stained glass window, glazed in very pale ambers and yellows and faded pinks. It depicted a woman in a nun's habit, her eyes closed, standing in a field of lilies. Behind her, in the middle distance, stood a man dressed in black, with his back turned. Even further away, on the horizon, stood a castle with black pennants flying from it.

    It was the strangest window that Effie had ever seen, and even though she wanted to find the weeping woman as quickly as she could, she stopped on the first stair to look at it, one hand clasping the banister, one foot raised. At the foot of the window, a stained-glass banner was unfurled, with the words
Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser
. She didn't know any German, but she guessed that
Schlaf
was something to do with sleep, since the nun appeared to be sleeping. But why standing up, in a field? And who was the man with his back turned? It reminded Effie of a scene from a tarot card, mystic and pseudo-medieval, magical rather than historical.

    For a moment, while she looked at the window, it seemed to Effie that the sobbing had stopped. But then she heard the woman cry out, a thin high-pitched cry, and then start to weep and beg as if somebody were hurting her and wouldn't let her go.

    She went quickly and quietly up to the top of the second flight of stairs. As she passed it by, the stained-glass window threw the pattern of the nun's closed eyes across her cheek, and then the black banners momentarily flew across her forehead.

    At the top, she found herself at the crossroads of three corridors: one directly in front of her that was shadowy and thick with dust-bunnies, leading across to the north side of the house; a second that led to the western wing, which looked as if it had once been the staff quarters,' because there were so many small bedroom doors; and a long corridor which led back to the east, to the front of the house.

    This corridor was partly in shadow and partly sunny, because the roof had collapsed in several places, and clogged it with fallen rafters and ceiling plaster and heaps of tiles. She could see the crippled oaks that guarded Valhalla's gate, and beyond them, to the highlands, where heavy charcoal-coloured clouds still hung, and lightning flickered spitefully at the treetops.

    Because so much of it was open to the sky, the corridor was still dripping from the storm, and wet tarpaper flapped in the breeze like the last feeble convulsions of a wounded crow. There was a strong smell, too: a smell that Effie didn't like at all. It wasn't just damp and decay, it was death, too, and when she started to climb over the first heap of broken tiles, she found out what it was. Her foot crunched through splintered clay, and rotten laths, and into a rancid underworld of feathers and straw and tattered fabric. The stench of this material was appalling, but it was only when Effie was able to extricate her foot that she realised what it was. A huge, thick layer of squirrels' nesting, as springy and fibrous as a mattress. It was thick with the bodies of squirrels' young: some skeletal, some partly mummified, some that were liquefied horrors of hair and claws and glutinous yellowish-grey slime.

    Effie felt her stomach contract, and she gagged. She dragged out her foot - then skipped, half-hopped along the corridor. Her heart was palpitating as if she had a huge moth trapped inside one of her ventricles, desperate to get out.

    She stood still to steady herself, her hand pressed against her forehead. God, she had once heard a handyman warning her father not to allow squirrels to nest in his rafters, but until now she had never known why.

    She took six or seven deep breaths to steady herself. The corridor was silent now. The sobbing seemed to have stopped. Effie crunched over another heap of broken tiles, keeping one hand against the wall to steady herself. Then she stopped, and listened, and very far away she could hear the sound of traffic on Route 9.

    For a moment, she wondered whether she had been imagining the sobbing. Maybe it had been nothing more than the sound of the wind, blowing through the roof. After all, who could be here, and why would they be weeping so desperately?

    She was plucking up her courage to step back over the crushed tiles and the squirrels' nest when she heard the sobbing yet again: and, this time, it sounded very much closer.

    She called out, 'Hallo? Hallo? Can you hear me? Where are you? Which room are you in? I'm coming to help you!'

    There was no reply, but the sobbing went on. Effie walked a few steps further along the corridor and opened the first door that she came to. It was swollen with damp, and she had to push it with her shoulder. It juddered on its hinges, and then stuck fast. Inside was an empty, unfurnished bedroom, with a pale blue carpet that still showed the rusted imprints of bed castors and the rectangular impressions of a nightstand and a large chest-of-drawers. The carpet was blotched with a large brownish stain close to where the bed must have stood: a stain in the shape of a goat's head, with asymmetric horns.

    There was a small rusted fireplace. Its grate was filled with damp ashes and some unpleasant-looking rags, some of them singed.

    Out of the dusty, grease-smeared windows, Effie could see the sloping roof of the house, and a cluster of tall earthenware chimney pots, and the treeline in the distance.

    The room gave her a feeling which she didn't like at all. It wasn't the coldness, or the damp, although the room was very draughty and the rain had soaked down behind the wallpaper and left it peeling and colourless and foxed with brown spots. It was a feeling of terrible closeness, a feeling of unsolicited and unwanted intimacy, as if somebody very unpleasant were following her around, staying so near to her that she could almost feel their breath on her cheek.

    She stepped back towards the door, her movements stiff, trying to suppress her alarm. She had never believed that houses could be haunted, but the atmosphere in this empty bedroom was deeply unsettling. It was even worse than being followed, it was like being touched, like having to submit to prurient caresses from somebody she couldn't bear.

    She opened and closed her mouth, trying to speak, but she had lost the breath for it.

    Then she jolted in fright, because suddenly she heard the sobbing again, and it sounded more agonised than ever. She was sure that she could make out a miserable plea of, 'Don't- please don't- please don't.' But it could have been the wind, distorting the weeping into words, or it could have been her own imagination.