The House That Jack Built (20 page)

    'No,' she admitted.

    'Old houses always make weird noises. Come on, you've drunk too much champagne, that's your trouble.'

    She wrapped herself up in the blanket and fell asleep almost at once. It was like falling down a black, echoing well. She dreamed that she was walking into the blue-carpeted bedroom and a woman dressed in white was standing by the window. The woman was silent. She didn't turn around. She didn't speak. Effie found that she was gliding across the floor towards the woman, even though she wasn't moving her legs, even though she didn't want to.

    She was terrified of what the woman's face might look like. She had a feeling that it might be diseased, or disfigured, or even a flesh-bare skull. She kept gliding nearer and nearer and she wanted to put out her arms to stop herself but she couldn't.

    And then the woman turned around and she had the misshapen face of the plaster-creature, with one glistening eye, and an awful scabby maw encrusted with white mineral salts.

    She woke up, thrashing and gasping. She sat up and found her wristwatch. She had slept only twenty minutes. The moon was still shining, and the bedroom was silent. Even Craig had stopped snoring. In fact, when she reached out for him, he wasn't there at all.

    'Craig?' she called. 'Craig, are you there?'

    She got up and walked across to the bathroom. He had probably gone for a pee. 'Craig?' she called, in a stage whisper, although she didn't know why, in a huge empty house like this. 'Craig, are you in there?'

    She opened the bathroom door but the bathroom was empty, and dark. The moon gleamed on sea-green tiles, and a bath with a rust-coloured stain down one side. She saw a pale, blurred face on the other side of the room, and for a split-second it gave her a jolt of fright, until she realised that it was her own face, in the dusty mirror over the washbasin.
Une ombre lointaine
.

    She was returning to the futon when she thought she heard a scream, somewhere in the house. She listened and listened but it wasn't repeated and she wasn't sure that she had heard it at all.
Owls?
she thought. She hoped that Norman hadn't fallen and hurt himself. And where was Craig?

    She knelt down and lit one of the pressure lamps. She was clipping the top back on it when the door from the corridor opened and Craig came back into the room. He looked sweaty and agitated, although he was grinning.

    'Thought you were sleeping,' he said, sitting on the futon to ease off his shoes.

    'I was.'

    'Do you want to turn that lamp off again? Maybe we can get some well-earned sleep.'

    'Where did you go?'

    He lay down, and turned his back to her, and said nothing.

    'Craig… I asked you a question. Where did you go?'

    'What's this, the third degree? I just went for a leak, okay?'

    'The bathroom's right here.'

    'Sure, but there's no water-supply, is there?'

    'Oh… no, I forgot about that.'

    He turned back and stared at her. He didn't look himself at all. There was something gross about him, something coarse. She couldn't exactly say what it was, but she didn't like it at all.

    'So, are you going to kill that lamp, or what?'

    'Oh, sure. Sorry.'

    She lay back and stared up at the ceiling. After a while she said, 'I thought I heard somebody screaming. Did you hear that?'

    He snorted and jostled as if he were annoyed at being disturbed. 'Nobody screamed, honey. You've got the jittery ab-dabs, that's all. Now will you please try to sleep?'

    'Sorry.'

    But she found it impossible to sleep. She lay on her back; she lay on her side. She turned over and lay on the other side. She kept thinking about the woman dressed in white, standing by the bedroom window. Had she really seen a woman, or was it an optical illusion, an oddly-shaped assembly of wallpaper and moonlight? She remembered stepping out of the Red Oaks Inn once, when she was nine, and seeing a dark, enormous man leaning against the side of her father's car. She had walked along the verandah, staring at the man in horror, and as her viewpoint had changed, the man's arm had magically turned itself into a shadow beneath the side-mirror, and his head and shoulders had revealed themselves to be nothing more than reflections in the windshield of sky and clouds and a nearby oak tree.

    Craig was sleeping deeply now, groaning and snorting like a man trying to swim a quarter of a mile underwater. She kept trying to push him away, but he kept turning over until he was leaning against her, and his face was only inches from hers.

    'Impossible,' he said, in his sleep. The moon began to appear around the other side of the house. 'Yussuchabitch.'

    'Craig,' Effie protested, but she couldn't wake him.

    'No such- jusslike- Gaby-'

    She was almost on the very edge of the futon now, with her right elbow against the thick, prickly underfelt. She reached down to turn him over bodily, and it was then she felt his flaccid penis against the back of her hand. It was cold and wet, but not with urine. It was actually slippery, as if he had ejaculated in his sleep. She knew that could happen, especially if a man hadn't had sex for a long time, but his thigh wasn't wet and neither was the futon.

    She lifted her fingers up to her nose and sniffed them, and the salty, bleachy smell told her at once that it was semen. Yet she detected another smell, too. An aromatic smell, more like a woman's sexual fluids than a man's.

    She lay on her back while the moon rotated around Valhalla and her brain leapt and juggled in the shadows. Had he simply climaxed in his sleep? Or had he left the bedroom to masturbate somewhere? Why should he do that? If he wanted sex, she was there, right next to him, and she wouldn't have denied him if he had really wanted it desperately.

    But the other possibility that kept haunting her was that she was right, and that they weren't alone in the house. The other possibility was that Craig had crept out of the bedroom to find another woman, and to make love to her. But who could such a woman be? Not the woman dressed in white, surely - even if there really was a woman dressed in white.

    Why would she sob? Why would she scream? What was she doing in the house, and why would she make love to a total stranger in the middle of the night? That was if Craig was a total stranger.

    Could this woman be 'Gaby'?

    Effie's thoughts went around and around in a carousel of prancing bewilderment and fleeting doubts. She was tempted to go back upstairs, to search Valhalla room by room. But it was well past four o'clock now, and she was aching and tired, and she didn't know whether she wanted any of her questions actually resolved. If there was a real woman here, a real 'Gaby', Effie didn't want to face her, not here, and not now. And if the woman was nothing more than a white-dressed figure in the moonlight, or a trick of the light, or a sobbing voice that nobody could exorcise, she didn't want to face her, either.

    Especially if she turned around, as she had in Effie's dream, and showed her the half-melted face of the plaster-creature.

    In the morning, prowling barefooted around the house, she found Norman in the middle of the ballroom, wound up tight in an old pink blanket. He was still holding his architects' tape-measure in the palm of his hand. His eyes were closed and his mouth was wide open, and he sounded as if he were singing a song.

    

    

    The Hungry Moon was half way down Main Street on the left-hand side, a small storefront in between Hautboy Antiques and The Goose & Gander Kitchenware Store. Its frontage was painted olive green and gold, and its shiny windows were filled with gilded moons and mounted crystals and patchwork cushions filled with pot-pourri, as well as occult books and mirrors and tarot cards.

    Effie came down the sunny, brick-paved street, enjoying the cool wind that blew off the river and the shade of the maples that lined the sidewalk. She stopped and peered up at the sign which hung outside the Hungry Moon. She had never really looked at it closely before. It was a copper casting of a crescent moon, with nose and eyes and a wide-open mouth, but what Effie hadn't realised was that the mouth was crammed with a cat, a violin, a cow's legs, a frightened-looking dog, a plate and a spoon. The moon from the nursery-rhyme 'hey-diddle-diddle' had greedily swallowed everything else. It was folksy, picturesque, but curiously disturbing, too, as if some warm and folksy friend had suddenly turned out to be a dangerous psychopath.

    The door was open and Effie stepped inside. The store was small, with bare polished boards, but the shelves were stacked with every imaginable herb and spice and occult device. Black tin witches hung from the ceiling, and revolved slowly in the summer breeze. There were old-style broomsticks and crystal balls, witch-dolls and glazed mandrake-fruits, and heaps of books and pamphlets on everything from wholesome eating to flying spells. The fragrance was overpowering, cloves and orange peel and jasmine, and some hauntingly rotten-sweet odour like waterwort.

    There was nobody behind the red-painted wooden counter, so Effie rang the little bell that stood beside the baroque brass cash register. Nobody appeared so she rang it again, and eventually a young woman came through a screen of beads, carrying a stack of books.

    'You'll have to forgive me,' she said. 'My son usually helps me out, but he's preoccupied with other things right now. Right at the beginning of the season, of course.'

    Norman's face was rarely visible behind his curtains of hair, but what Effie had seen of it didn't much resemble his mother's. Norman was thin-faced and large-nosed. Pepper Moriarty had broad features with strong bone-structure and a small, straight nose. Her ash-blonde hair was tied in an indigo-dyed bandana, and she wore huge dangly hoop earrings. Her eyes were strange. The irises were very pale grey, so that when the light caught them they looked almost silver. She had a wide smile with more than her fair share of extremely white teeth.

    She put down the books and came around the counter. Woodstock had obviously left an indelible impression on her. She was very big-breasted but she wore a thin butter-muslin blouse without a bra, although she had an Afghan waistcoat on top of it embroidered with tufts of red-and-black wool and beads and stars and tiny sparkling mirrors. Her stonewashed denim jeans were skintight at the top, but widened into raggedy flares. She wore high-heeled tan-leather boots, but even in these she wasn't more than 5 ft. 5 ins. tall.

    'Your son's been working with me and my husband,' said Effie. 'I'm Effie Bellman. We're the people who are thinking of buying Valhalla.'

    'Oh,' Pepper Moriarty replied. 'You're the one with that less-than-polite lawyer for a husband.'

    Effie felt herself blushing. 'I'm sorry about that. It's just that Craig's been through quite a difficult time. He was... well, he had an accident. We came to Cold Spring to give him some time to get over it. You know, get a little rest.'

    'I wouldn't have thought that buying Valhalla was very restful. That place is a ruin.'

    'My husband's set on it,' said Effie, trying hard to smile. 'He's really obsessed with doing it up.'

    'Well, best of luck, that's all I can say,' said Pepper. 'I wouldn't live in Valhalla if you gave it to me. In fact, I wouldn't live in Valhalla if you gave it to me and paid me a thousand bucks a night to stay in it.'

    Effie hesitated, and then she said, 'That's the reason I came to see you.'

    'Oh, yes?' Pepper started to take small coloured-glass bottles off the shelf next to the counter, dust them, and put them back. She paused, and focused those almost-silver eyes on Effie, and said, 'You stayed the night there, didn't you? You really went ahead and did it.'

    'That's right. We did.'

    'How sensitive are you?' Pepper asked her.

    'Cat-hairs make me sneeze; and some of the summer grasses. Why?'

    'I wasn't talking about hay fever, I was talking about psychic vibrations.'

    'Well… if it was a psychic vibration, I heard a woman upstairs in one of the bedrooms.'

    'What was she doing?'

    'She was crying. She went on and on, and kept saying "help me." '

    'So what did you do?'

    'I tried to find her, of course.'

    Pepper puffed out her cheeks. 'Phewf! You're crazier than I thought!'

    'I just had to know if she was real or not. I mean, if Craig and I are actually going to live in Valhalla 'Did you find her?' asked Pepper, sharply.

    'I'm not sure. I found the room where the crying was coming from... and I thought I might have just glimpsed somebody, only for an instant. But... I don't know. I'm not sure what I saw.'

    'Did your husband hear it, too?'

    Effie shook her head. 'If he did, he didn't say.'

    'But you told him that you could hear it?'

    Effie kept on shaking her head. 'Something stopped me. I don't know what it was. I felt that I shouldn't, that's all.'

    'That's very interesting,' said Pepper. 'One of the tests of a true psychic vibration is that it's very selective… it doesn't make itself known to every Tom, Dick or Harry.'

    Effie said, carefully, 'I had the feeling that the woman specifically didn't want Craig to know that she was there.'

    'Very interesting,' Pepper nodded. 'And is that all you've heard, just this one woman crying?'

    'It's all I've heard. Well, apart from something that could have been a scream, but I think that was only an owl. I did see somebody, though. A man, in a dark suit. He was going downstairs and I called out to him, but he looked at me as if he couldn't even see me.'