The House That Jack Built (19 page)

    'Come on, buddy,' Craig told him, standing up, and resting his hand on Norman's shoulders. 'I think it's time to call it a night, don't you?'

    'Guess so… yes, sure. See you tomorrow. Bright and early, I guess!' He teetered slightly to the right, and then teetered back to the left. Jeez… this champagne. You could drink this stuff all night, couldn't you?'

    'I could,' said Craig, with unexpected coldness, as Norman walked diagonally to the doors. 'I don't think you could, though, little man.'

    Effie reached across and tugged at the leg of Craig's jeans. He didn't flinch or resist, but on the other hand he didn't look any too pleased, either. 'Are you sure he's going to be safe?' she asked him quietly. Her voice sounded flat and muffled, as if she had a cardboard box over her head. The interior acoustics in Valhalla were very unpredictable. One minute your words could be carried all around the house. The next, you couldn't hear anything but that slow magnificent creaking, and the showering-down of dead plaster, and your own expensive watch frantically ticking your life away.

    'Oh, he'll be safe,' Craig told her. He waited for a while, till Norman had said 'goodnight, folks' for the fifth time and had weaved his way out of the double bedroom doors. Then he got up and walked lithely and silently across the underfelt, to close the doors firmly and lock them. 'There. Just in case he takes a wrong turning, during the night. This is our adventure, after all.'

    He walked back across the room, stripping off his sweater as he did so, and tugging out his thick brown leather belt with a loud, unpleasant snap.

    'Craig, I'm tired. And I really don't like this house very much.'

    He lay down next to her, and kissed her. The pressure lamps hissed at every point of the compass. 'You'll grow to like it, I promise you. I know it's damp, at the moment. I know it's cold. But you wait till it's finished. This is going to be your palace, princess. Princess Effie, of Valhalla, how does that sound?'

    Effie stared at the crumpled futon inches in front of her face, with a sprig of verbena still clinging to it. She had read about verbena: it was supposed to have the power to turn the sun blue.

    She could hear Craig tugging off his socks. Then he was naked, and close up behind her. She felt his erection bobbing against her jeans. 'Princess,' he whispered, close to her ear, but he wouldn't have done, if he had known how much she hated anybody to call her 'princess'. It made her feel like a prom queen at a rundown inner-city high school, or a daddy's girl (which she was, and always would be, but not in that way).

    He reached around and tried to unbuckle her belt, but she twisted and resisted and pushed him away. 'Come on, Craig… I just want to get some sleep.'

    'Heyy, sweetness… that's not what you said before. You've been begging me for it for months.'

    'That was before. And that wasn't here.'

    'What's the matter with here?' His voice was hard. She knew that there was going to be trouble, whatever she said.

    'It's old. It's falling down. It's uncomfortable. That's the matter with it.'

    He pulled her quite roughly onto her back, and climbed astride her. He looked down at her and he was very handsome, in that broad-faced Kennedy kind of way, with questioning eyes and thin lips which were almost smiling but not quite. He took hold of her hand and forced her to hold his erection. It was hot, hotter than her own body temperature, and her fingertip touched a snail's trail, just at the tip. She really didn't feel like this at all. The lamps made his eyes look uneven, as if one were set higher than the other, and there was something absurd and threatening in what he was doing to her. She didn't want to hold his cock. She didn't want to be lying on this herby-smelling futon. She wanted to be snuggled up in bed, in the longest safest nightgown she could think of, with her toes curled up, and be left alone.

    

    

    Craig was snoring.

    He lay on his back with his arms and his legs spread out as if he had dropped from the top of a high building. Every now and then he twitched and muttered, and Effie knew he was dreaming.

    Once he said, 'Gaby, you're a bitch.' Then, 'Gaby' again.

    Effie couldn't sleep at all. She had dropped off for a few minutes after Craig had finished having sex with her, but she had been woken up by a violent and terrifying nightmare in which she was throwing herself through a window. She had crouched under her blanket, gasping for breath, convinced that she had actually heard the glass breaking, and convinced that she had miscarried. She reached down between her legs, expecting to find blood, but of course it wasn't blood at all.

    Since then, she had been lying close to Craig, watching him sleep, and wondering if her life would ever be the same again.

    She wondered, too, why she had imagined that she had miscarried. She had never been pregnant; although she had always wanted to have children, when Craig became established as a top-flight lawyer. Perhaps her unconscious had been trying to tell her that her chance of becoming a mother was dwindling by the day. Perhaps her unconscious had been trying to tell her that she had no chance at all.

    'Gaby, if I catch you-' Craig murmured, and then boisterously turned over onto his side, dragging most of the covers with him.

    Effie waited for a while, until he started snoring again, and then sat up. She felt exhausted and hung-over and her left hip ached. She would have done anything for a hot cup of lemon tea, but all that Craig had brought was a bottle of Perrier water. She shuffled across the floor, unscrewed it, and drank it straight from the neck.

    It was then that she thought she heard the sobbing again. It was so faint that it could have been anything: a shutter swinging, an owl calling. Even the crackling of bubbles from the open Perrier bottle made it harder for her to make out what it was. She stood up, and listened again. It was still impossible to distinguish what it was.

    She tiptoed in her socks to the door which led out to the corridor, turned the handle and eased it open.

    It was dark, because the moon had yet to rise, but Effie could see that the corridor ran the whole length of the second storey to the landing where the hunched plaster-creature stood. Most of its windows were broken, but the tattered remnants of net curtains still silently billowed at every one, like a procession of ghostly brides.

    She listened again, and this time she was quite sure. It was a woman sobbing - not high-pitched, not keening, but the terrible deep lung-wrenching cry of utter desolation.

    Effie waited and waited. She was growing cold and her neck was stiff, but she couldn't make up her mind if she should go upstairs again or not. After all, there had been nobody in the blue-carpeted bedroom the last time she had ventured into it. If Valhalla were haunted, maybe this disembodied sobbing was as far as it went.

    She looked back at Craig but he was still sleeping as if he had been struck on the head. She hesitated a little longer, and then she crept out of the room and closed the door behind her. Her heart was beating quickly but she was determined not to be frightened. Not too frightened, anyway. If the sobbing was only that, and nothing more, then she had nothing to worry about. But if there were somebody there, a real woman who needed real help, then she would never forgive herself for having ignored her.

    She passed room after room: a sewing-room, in which she glimpsed an empty embroidery frame; a room with a closed door and a recent sign saying Danger Keep Out, which was the music-room; and then two doors which led to the upper gallery of the ballroom. The sobbing grew louder, and even more anguished, and Effie thought: this time, I'm going to find you. This time, I'm going to help you. Whatever's wrong, whatever's happened, I'm going to stop you from sobbing. Because this woman sobbed in the way that all women sob, whether they do it outwardly or whether they keep it silently locked up inside themselves. They sob because they realise, one day, that they were born on a planet of men, and that short of death or spinsterhood they can never escape.

    Effie's Aunt Rachel used to say, 'Even the slaves could run away, but where can women go?' Effie had never understood what she meant until Craig had started working in international law; and she had become his acquiescent geisha, just like the wives of all the other lawyers and vice-presidents and managing directors. Good evening, I am the wife of Craig Bellman. Who are you?

    Suddenly she found herself out on the second-storey landing where the plaster-creature lived. She stopped. The sobbing was so distinct now that she could almost hear what the woman was saying. The moon had just appeared over the horizon, and the stained-glass window gleamed like a giant spiderweb.
Gut ist der Schlaf, der Tod ist besser
. Perhaps she could understand that, too.

    She was just about to climb the stairs when something made her look jumpily around. At first she couldn't think what it was, but then she realised, and the realisation made her feel as if centipedes were crawling down her back, inside her sweater. The plaster-creature was gone. Where it had stood, the wall was scabby and stained, and the laths were exposed, like the ribs of a half-collapsed mummy. But it had completely disappeared - that lumpy, dripping thing with its hideous Elephant Man head and its one glutinous eye.

    Effie stood at the bottom of the stairs with one hand on the rough, flaking banister rail and she felt faint with fright. If the plaster-creature wasn't here, where was it? She had a horrifying vision of it shuffling painfully through the darkened corridors of Valhalla, hunched and distorted, trying to find where she was. It may even have climbed up the stairs ahead of her, and be waiting at the top.

    'This is crazy,' she said, out loud. 'You're imagining things. You're just working yourself up into a panic.'

    She took half a dozen deep breaths. Then she said, 'I can't believe I said that out loud! I must be going out of my mind!'

    Cautiously, she raised her eyes. The moon had risen even higher now, and the hooded woman in the stained-glass window had taken on a cold, beatified shine. The banners on the distant battlements seemed to be slowly furling and unfurling, and the lilies quivered as if somebody had just walked through them. Sleep is good, but death is better, the window whispered, and for the very first time in her life Effie felt mortally afraid.

    But it was too late for her to turn back. The sobbing still echoed down the staircase, and she knew that she was going to have to find where it was coming from, and face it, whatever it was. She took a huge, steadying breath, and lifted her right foot onto the staircase. It felt as if she had been sitting on it for too long, and it had turned numb.

    
Help me,
the woman begged her, between her sobs.
Please, if you can hear me, help me.

    
Oh God,
thought Effie, as she climbed the stairs. Her legs felt too weak to carry her, and her will was draining away from her with every step. Yet she knew she had to go on. If she didn't discover who was sobbing, she would never be able to live here, and if she couldn't live in Valhalla, then she couldn't live with Craig any longer, because the house, to him had become such an overwhelming obsession.

    She passed the window and carried on upward. On the third-storey landing she hesitated fora few moments, to calm herself down. Then she walked along the moonlit corridor towards the blue-carpeted bedroom, looking as spectral herself as any ghost.

    Since Morton Walker's fall through the floor, most of the broken tiles and squirrels' debris had been cleared away, or swept to one side, and a tarpaulin had been rigged up over the open roof. Further along the corridor, where Morton had actually dropped through to the music-room, two criss-cross planks barred the way, and the hole itself had been covered with a sheet of heavy-duty ply.

    Effie reached the bedroom. The door was half open, and she could hear the woman sobbing quite distinctly. She wasn't imagining it or dreaming it; and it wasn't the wind blowing down the chimney, because there was scarcely any wind tonight.

    
Please, please, please, if you can help me-

    She grasped the door handle. She didn't know whether she had the courage to open it. She waited and waited, and all the time the woman sobbed and sobbed as if she could never stop.

    She pushed it open.

    For one instant, she thought she saw a woman dressed in white, standing by the window. But then Craig said, 'Effie? Eff, what the hell are you doing?'

    Effie turned around, her whole nervous system lingling with shock. Craig was standing at the head of the stairs, wearing nothing but his jeans and his shoes, with his flashlight in his hand. She turned back to the bedroom, but the flashlight had dazzled her, and when she looked again, the woman (if it had been a woman) had disappeared.

    Craig came up to her and put his arm around her shoulders. 'You shouldn't wander around up here, it's dangerous.'

    'I thought- I thought I heard something.'

    'I woke up and there you weren't. You had me worried.'

    'I'm sorry. I didn't want to disturb you.'

    'Come on, let's go back and see if we can catch some more sleep.'

    'Craig-'

    'What's the matter, sweetheart?'

    'I think there's somebody here, apart from us.'

    'Well, sure there is. Norman.'

    'I mean apart from Norman, too. I think there are people living here.'

    He ushered her gently out of the bedroom and closed the door behind him. 'I don't see how that could be.'

    'But I keep hearing things, seeing things.' She swallowed, and she felt as guilty as if she were breaking somebody's confidence. 'I heard a woman crying, I'm sure of it.' He paused at the top of the stairs. 'You can't hear it now, can you?'