The House That Jack Built (25 page)

    'Oh my God,' said Pepper. 'I can hardly hold it.'

    The hazel had bent back so far that it was pointing at the runic medallion that hung around her neck. Effie took hold of her arm and she could feel the effort that Pepper was having to make just to keep the twig from flying out of her hands. All the same, it didn't crack, didn't even splinter.

    'What is it?' she asked, aghast. 'Why is it bending itself back like that?'

    'I can't- it won't- it refuses?

    'What do you mean it refuses? Pepper! It's only a twig, and you're holding it!'

    Pepper stared at her with those glittering silver eyes, swallowing hard. 'I mean that I won't go any further. Not in there. I can't.'

    She hesitated for one more moment, and then she flung the twig away from her, across the corridor, as if she had suddenly seen an earwig crawling up it. It fell beneath one of the windows, and gradually unbent itself.

    'Pepper,' said Effie, 'what is it? What's wrong?'

    'I don't know,' she trembled. She was shaking, and she kept anxiously rubbing her arm. 'Whatever it is, I can't face it. It's far too strong… it's so much stronger than it ever was before. Maybe it's me, maybe it's you. I don't know. But if you could feel what I felt-'

    Effie glanced at the twig. 'Maybe I should try.'

    'No, don't. You probably wouldn't feel anything, but you never know. You may be more sensitive than you think.'

    'But what was it?'

    'It was like a darkness… a kind of emptiness. I can't describe it. I just felt that something totally grotesque was going on.'

    Effie bit her lip. She didn't know what to think about any of this. There was obviously something wrong here at Valhalla, but was it really 'psychic vibration'? She enjoyed Pepper's mysticism, her magic pantry and her lexicon of spells, but could Pepper really give her a rational explanation of what was happening, so that they could exorcise it, or whatever they had to do? She was beginning to feel that the answers to her problems would be found in the real world, rather than the world of spirits and dreams and hedge-magic.

    'You don't want to try again?' she asked Pepper.

    Pepper shook her head. 'I'm sorry, Effie. I didn't want to let you down. But-' she looked towards the closed ballroom doors and her eyes said it all. 'There's dread in there, Effie. You don't have any idea.'

    Effie shook her head. 'You haven't let me down, I promise. I'll just have to talk to Craig about it, and see what he thinks.'

    'You're going to tell Craig?'

    'What else can I do?'

    'But that feeling you had, that you shouldn't tell him about it. I wouldn't ignore that feeling, if I were you.'

    'I have to do something. I can't think of living here, the way it is, no matter what's wrong with it.'

    'Effie… a woman from another time was appealing to you… begging you not to tell him. Don't you think that you ought to respect that appeal, at least for now? At least until you find out why she doesn't want you to tell him.'

    Effie said, 'I'm very confused. I really am.'

    Pepper looked quickly at the ballroom doors. 'We ought to go.'

    But Effie stayed where she was, thinking. There had to be some rational explanation for all of this - for the sobbing woman and the man on the stairs.
Gut ist der Schlaf… der Tod ist besser
.

    'You really can't do any more?' she asked Pepper.

    Pepper said, 'I'm sorry.' She clasped her hand against her forehead as if she had a headache. 'It makes me feel as if I'm just about to die.'

    'I just want to know what it is? You say there's dread in here, but what does that mean? Dread?'

    'Effie, leave it.'

    But Effie, in frustration, pushed the doors wide open. She wasn't sucked into oblivion. There was no vacuum, no darkness. Only the stately gloom of the ballroom, with the clogged-up light from the glass dome high above it, and the pillars and the balcony.

    And then - in the blink of an eye - she was right in the centre of the floor, and the lights suddenly brightened, and she was dancing. She couldn't think how she had got there, or why she was dancing. She couldn't hear music at first, but then she could. It was Strauss, and she hated Strauss, but she couldn't stop dancing. She went around and around the floor, and all she could see was a circling blur of pillars and lights and blurry faces.

    Because there were people here, the ballroom was crowded with people.

    She was so startled that she couldn't catch her breath. She felt as if she had suddenly stepped into the ocean, out of her depth. She twisted her head around, trying to see where Pepper was, but all she could see were pale, unfocused faces. She tried to stop herself from dancing, but strong male arms enclosed themselves around her and swept her away, and she turned back in amazement to see that she was dancing with a tall man in white tie and tails. She could feel the grasp of his warm, white-gloved hands. She could feel his pristine shirt-front. He danced with power and rhythm, and there was nothing she could do but follow him wherever he led.

    She tried to focus on his face, but even though they were dancing they were dancing so close, all she could see were dark smudgy eyes and a wide grinning mouth. It was like trying to look at him through a pane of glass smeared with Vaseline.

    'Stop,' she tried to say, as he circled the floor for a second time. Her voice sounded flat and plugged-up, and she wasn't certain that she had managed to speak at all.

    But the man didn't stop and he didn't reply, either. He kept on dancing to that damned Strauss and everybody watched them as they spun and swayed.

    Effie thought that she could hear the people making a dull, baying sound, but it hardly sounded like people at all. They could have been pigs and donkeys dressed up in tails and evening-gowns. She was reminded of some nightmarish nursery-rhyme world, in which animals wore clothes and hats and disdainfully squinted at their human inferiors through monocles, even though they were still just as bestial and dangerous underneath.

    'Stop, you're hurting me!' Effie pleaded. But the man continued to sweep her around, with that same irresistible rhythm, and that stretched, almost lunatic grin. What was worse, he was hurting her. He was crushing her fingers together with his right hand, while his left hand seemed to dig into her back. And as her perception heightened, she became conscious of something else, too. A sharp, agonising pricking in the soles of her feet. She tried to break her stride and to pull herself free, but she couldn't - not only because she wasn't strong enough, but because she was just as much caught up in the waltz as he was. She felt as if she were dancing on sharpened kitchen knives, and every step made her calf muscles spasm because she knew that it was going to hurt so much. Yet, madly, she carried on dancing, even when she thought she felt blood on her ankles.

    The man said, in a deep, indistinct voice, 'I bet them that you would waltz for me.'

    Effie said, 'What? What did you say?'

    'I bet them that you would waltz for me, barefoot, on broken glass.'

    'What do you mean? Who are you? What do you mean?'

    'I said that you would do anything for me… and one of them said, I bet she wouldn't dance for you, barefoot, on broken glass. But here you are, my darling. Here you are!'

    'What?' screamed Effie. But the man didn't repeat himself. He swept her round again, and laughed; and the people in the ballroom laughed, too, that hideous sub-human baying. The man turned to the people in the ballroom and lifted his hand in triumph - and in that one instant when he was acknowledging the applause of his admirers, and the waltz momentarily paused, Effie at last managed to twist herself out of the man's embrace, and stop. When she stopped, the music died away, too, disintegrating into discordant squeaks and scrapes and spasmodic drumbeats. The lights dimmed all around the room, until they gave off nothing but a sickly, intermittent flicker. The man stood in shadow, his arms by his sides. She couldn't see his face but she could tell by the way that his shoulders were hunched and his fists were clenched that he was angry with her. Not just angry. Quaking with rage.

    For the first time, she looked down at the floor. It was littered with broken champagne glasses, slices and shards and shattered stems. Then she looked down at her feet. At first she thought that she was wearing scarlet socks, but then she realised that her feet were bare, and that the broken glass had cut thin bloody curves into her heels and her soles, and that the top of one of her big toes had been almost completely sliced off, like the top of a boiled egg. She felt chilled with shock. She stood where she was, shaking, and she didn't know what to do.

    The man approached her. It was too dark for her to see his face, and besides she didn't want to. 'I bet that you would happily waltz for me, The Blue Danube, barefoot, on broken glass. Look how many glasses I've broken for you, and all of them the finest French crystal.'

    He reached out with the finger and thumb of his left hand as if he were going to tilt her chin up, so that she would have to look at him. But as he did so, Effie bit into his finger, hard, and she heard him bellow in pain and devastating fury.

    She twisted herself away, and at the same time she felt an extraordinary wrench, like somebody pushing her too quickly through a revolving door. She stumbled, and lifted up her hands to save herself in case she fell, but then she realised that she was still outside the ballroom, in daylight. Pepper was only two or three feet away, bending over to retrieve her hazel twig.

    'I-' she started; but she couldn't find the words. She stared into the ballroom with a mixture of fear and astonishment. For one split second, she could understand why people went mad.

    'What's the matter?' Pepper asked her. She held her hazel wrapped in a yellow Nepalese scarf, so that she would be insulated from any psychic vibrations.

    'I thought that I was... dancing,' Effie breathed.

    'You were standing right there,' said Pepper, perplexed.

    'No, no, I was right inside the ballroom and it was full of people in evening dress and I was dancing.'

    Pepper came up to her and looked her straight in the face, her silver eyes darting from side to side like restless fish, looking for clues, looking for reality. 'You mean it, don't you?' she said. 'You're telling the truth.'

    Effie's self-possession began to dissolve, and her eyes were suddenly crowded with tears. 'I just opened the doors, and there I was, right in the centre of the ballroom, dancing with this tall dark man. The whole room was filled with people, I swear it. I could hear them. I could see them. And they were playing The Blue Danube.'

    Pepper took hold of her hands. 'Did you see any faces? Did you see who any of these people were?'

    Effie, her mouth crumpled in misery, shook her head. 'I thought they looked like animals, dressed up. They made a noise like animals. It was horrible.'

    'My God, you're sensitive all right,' said Pepper. 'You're so damned sensitive you don't even need a hazel twig.'

    'But it was horrible. It was so horrible. I felt a pain in my feet and I looked down and I didn't have any shoes,on, and I'd been dancing on broken glass. And there was so much blood. And the man said- the man said-'

    'Hey, come on, honey,' said Pepper, wiping her eyes for her. 'This wasn't real. None of this was real.'

    Effie swallowed. 'He said that he'd made a bet that I would dance for him, dance for him happily, on broken glass.'

    Pepper said nothing for a moment, then held her close, shushing her and patting her on the back. After a while, though, Effie pulled away. 'What was it?' she asked. 'How could anything like that happen?'

    'I told you. It's a psychic vibration. I felt it, but you actually saw it. You were actually part of it. You must be acutely sensitive, Effie; and whatever vibrations there are in this house, they must be very powerful. I never knew such power.' She leaned cautiously into the open ballroom door, and sniffed. 'Christ, you can even smell it, can't you? That smell like scent, and thunderstorms, all mixed together.'

    'What are we going to do? I can't possibly live here if that kind of thing keeps happening to me. I'd go out of my mind.'

    'The first thing we can do is go find ourselves a stiff drink,' Pepper suggested. 'After that, I'd better start thinking about a full psychic cleansing - floor by floor, room by room. That's going to be difficult, and it could be very dangerous too.'

    'Is that like an exorcism?'

    'Unh-hunh. An exorcism is supposed to send demons back to hell, or unquiet spirits off to join their relatives in heaven. But exorcisms don't work because you can't exorcise something that doesn't exist in the first place. Did you ever see a demon? Do you know anybody who ever saw a demon?

    'No, a psychic cleansing is totally different because the psychic vibrations come from people who lived right here. You can't send them back anywhere, to heaven or to hell, mainly because there's no such place and also because they belong here, they didn't just live here "yesterday", they live here now, and they're going to be living here tomorrow… the same way you will, too.

    'The Bible was right about one thing. People are immortal. They're always being born, they're always growing up, they're always growing old. Time isn't, like, an endless ribbon. It's a series of locations. It's walking from place to place, from street to street.'

    'But if these people belong here, how can we get rid of them?'

    Pepper rubbed her eyebrow with the heel of her hand. She was looking tired. 'We don't get rid of them. We just find a way to keep them in their place. Anyway, let's get out of here.'