The House That Jack Built (26 page)

    Effie took one last nervous look into the ballroom, then she started to follow Pepper along the corridor. At once felt sharp, slicing pains in her feet; and she stopped, in horror.

    'Pepper!' she called. 'Pepper! My feet!'

    She was still wearing her white rope-soled deck-shoes. But the canvas was heavily soaked in dark red blood, and there were spatters of blood on her ankles. She felt ragingly hot, and then cold, and her head felt swimmy. She leaned against the panelling for support, but she was sure that she was going to faint. Pepper came jangling up to her in her beads and her bells and held onto her before she could fall.

    'My feet,' she whimpered. 'Oh God, Pepper, my feet.' She kept thinking about her big toe, and how the top of it had been sliced almost completely off.

    Pepper said, 'Sit down. Sit right here. I'll go to the car and call for help. Don't try to take your shoes off, whatever you do.'

    Effie awkwardly but carefully sat herself down on the floor. 'I'm okay,' she told Pepper. 'I'm okay.'

    But when Pepper ran off to call for the paramedics, tears started to roll down her cheeks, and then she sobbed, with clenched fists, until she felt that she was going to break in half. All she could think about was the pain in her feet, and that terrible frightening waltz, and Craig swearing 'Bitch!' at her every time they made love, and his hideous incomprehensible obsession with Valhalla.

    Her feet bled inside her shoes, she could feel the wetness welling between her toes. She tilted her head back against the wall and sobbed and sobbed, until at last she stopped, from sheer exhaustion.

    It was only when she heard Pepper running back that she realised what she had sounded like, when she was sobbing. She sounded like the woman in the blue-carpeted bedroom, exactly. The same desperation; the same inconsolable sadness. She bit the edge of her hand to stop herself. She was hurt, and she was shocked, but she wasn't going to allow herself to go right over the edge. She wasn't going to be part of whatever was happening, here in Valhalla, this psychic vibration, this haunting.

    Pepper hunkered down beside her. 'I called for an ambulance. They won't take too long. They said to keep your shoes on, just for now.'

    Effie tried to smile. 'I'm okay. Really, I'm quite okay.'

    'I think I made a slight error,' Pepper admitted. 'This is real, isn't it, this psychic vibration? It's actually intruding on us physically.' She held Effie's hand and squeezed it. 'You ought to stay away from Valhalla, Effie. Stay well away. I always thought this house had a bad feeling about it… but, Jesus.'

    'Don't worry,' Effie told her. 'I've made up my mind. Craig can buy Valhalla if he wants to, but not with any of my money; and he needn't expect me to live here.'

    'Are you serious?' Pepper asked her.

    Effie didn't reply, but rested her head back against the wall, and sat there quietly conserving her newly-discovered strength until she heard the whooping of an ambulance siren echoing across the derelict tennis courts.

    

    

    He burst into the room as if demons were after him. 'Effie! Jesus Christ! What happened?'

    She was lying on her bed at the Pig Hill Inn reading a slew of glossy magazines which Wendy O'Brien had brought up for her: Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest and Vogue. On the nightstand, there was a half-finished mug of hot chocolate and home-made cookies. Effie had washed her hair and her head was wrapped in a towel turban. Her feet, in their bandages, looked the same. She was very white: waxy-candle white, but she looked - and felt - very composed.

    'I told you,' she said, trying to smile. 'I cut my feet on some broken glass.'

    He sat down on the edge of the bed. He was gripping a bunch of yellow roses as if they were a weapon. 'What broken glass? Here, at the inn? We could sue them!'

    'I went to Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty. There was broken glass in the ballroom.'

    'I don't understand. You went to Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty? For why?'

    'She's a sensitive, Craig. I wanted to find out what was going on there. I wanted to exorcise it, if I could. Cleanse it. There's something badly wrong with Valhalla, Craig, something really abnormal, believe me.'

    'Taking some crackpot like her around it, trying to play exorcists? Come on, Effie. Be serious. These are the 1990's, not the 1790's.'

    'Well… I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure what these are,' said Effie; and managed to look at Craig strongly and steadily. There was a long, oblique pause between them. She knew now that they were no longer partners but combatants.

    'So how did you cut your feet?' he asked her. 'Weren't you wearing shoes?'

    'Of course I was… in the 1990's.'

    'What does that mean?'

    'I think it means that I cut them some other time, when I wasn't wearing shoes.'

    'Some other time? When? I don't understand.'

    'Why are you so impatient with me? Why do you keep trying to suggest that I'm talking nonsense? I cut my feet when I was dancing barefoot in the ballroom, with a man in evening dress. The ballroom was crowded with people; the orchestra was playing The Blue Danube.'

    Craig smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand. 'Effie... I don't know what this Pepper Moriarty's been telling you, but I've had it up to here. Steven was murdered. They cut his throat and made him look like a Happy Face. I'm in shock. I'm in grief. I'm mourning here, can you understand that? And you cut your feel because you weren't sensible enough to wear shoes and you blame it on some fantasy. Some goddamned psychic crap.'

    'I'm really sorry about Steven. But that doesn't alter what happened. I'm asking you to believe me, Craig. I really need you to believe me.'

    He suddenly smiled, shrugged, changed his expression. 'Listen… hey, I didn't mean to come on aggressive. I'm still kind of shaken by Steven, that's all.'

    She reached out and held his hand. 'Me too. It doesn't matter how he died; and it doesn't matter that I didn't particularly like him. I still didn't want to see him dead.' She rotated his wedding-band around his finger. 'I just want you to do something for me.'

    'Oh, yes?'

    'I want you to visit Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty, so that she can show you what it's really like. I want you to experience those psychic vibrations for yourself.'

    'With a view to what?'

    She pressed his hand tight. 'With a view to not buying it, Craig. I don't want that house, and I don't want you to buy that house.'

    'I paid the deposit already. We've agreed a price.'

    She was shocked. 'What? When?'

    'I called Walter Van Buren from the office. He said that Fulloni & Jahn were prepared to accept two-point-five. I said two or nothing; and they agreed. I mean, what could I do? I called you to discuss it but you weren't here. They're drawing the papers up now.'

    'You've agreed to buy Valhalla and you've paid the deposit and you haven't even discussed it with me?' Effie felt as if she had been abruptly immersed in a tub of chilled water.

    Craig gave her a boyish pout. 'I had to. Fulloni & Jahn said that, for that price, they had to have an immediate decision. What else could I do?'

    'You could have said no,' said Effie, in a high voice, and now she was really quaking.

    'I couldn't say no.'

    'Why not?' she screamed at him. 'I hate the place! I don't want it! I'm scared of it, and I hate it, and I won't even set one foot in it, ever again!'

    She paused for breath, her eyes filled with tears. Spots of blood were beginning to show through the bandages on her feet. 'You've agreed to pay two million dollars for it? Two million dollars is more than everything we own, everything we've ever saved, everything.'

    'We can manage,' he said. 'You know we can manage. When the partnership's sold-'

    'Who to? Steven can't buy you out - he's dead. How can you sell a law firm that doesn't have any lawyers?'

    'We can manage,' he repeated, doggedly. He was staring at the model on the cover of Vogue as if he could happily kill her. 'I can make plenty of money here and there… you'll see.'

    Effie looked at him for a long time and didn't know whether she hated him or whether she felt sorry for him. She cursed those hoodlums who had hit him with a hammer; but it was too late for that; and later than she even knew. 'Let me tell you something, Craig,' she said, 'what's ours is half mine, and you can't touch my half of anything without my permission. Call Walter Van Buren first thing tomorrow, and tell him you made a mistake.'

    'Norman's ordered the roof tiles already, and five thousand dollars' worth of joists.'

    'Well, tell him to fucking un-order them!' Effie screeched.

    Craig recoiled from her, but only slightly. Then he smiled. For Effie, that was the most frightening thing that he could have done, because it meant that no matter how much she protested, he was absolutely convinced that he was going to have his own way.

    

    

    That night, when she was still sleeping, drugged with paracetamol, he dragged up her nightdress, spread her thighs, and pushed himself into her. He woke her up when he started thrusting; but she lay back with her eyes closed, floppy and unresponsive, because she didn't want him to think that she needed him, or that she liked him. She was conscious of every grunt; and when he finally ejaculated she could feel his semen running out of her. But she still feigned sleep. She nearly was asleep: she kept sliding in and out of dreams and unconsciousness and wakefulness and pain. But she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing what she felt; or that he had actually excited her.

    She turned over onto her side and listened to him snore. It was strange, but she was sure that he had smelled different. Nothing to do with deodorant, or aftershave. A different body-smell. Slightly oilier, somehow; and a different feel, too. Smoother - and again, oilier.

    There was something else, too. She was sure that she had felt two testicles swinging against her when he had been thrusting himself into her. He couldn't have sneakily undergone a prosthetic operation in the two days that he had been back in the city; he wouldn't have healed yet; and he would have told her, wouldn't he? She had probably made a mistake. Too shocked, too exhausted, far too sedated. She tried to sleep but she kept thinking of dancing on broken champagne glasses, and the man with the blurry face, and in the end there was nothing she could do but huddle herself close while the sun rose behind the floral curtains and the birds started to twitter; her feet throbbing and her mind aching; and the unwanted semen of the husband she could no longer understand dripping coldly down her thigh.

    

    

    She opened the door and it was Pepper and Norman. Pepper was wearing a Cossack-style blouse in yellow and orange, and carrying a huge bunch of bright yellow chrysanthemums. Norman was looking pale and his jeans and his denim jacket were covered with plaster. 'I've been loading up gypsum boards,' he explained, brushing his shoulders and his sleeves until he almost disappeared in clouds of dust.

    'Hey... come on in,' said Effie. For the past week she had been staying with her mother and her Aunt Rhoda at her Aunt Rhoda's small, white-painted house in Carmel. It overlooked a steeply-sloping country road, and it was almost unnaturally peaceful. At night Effie could smell the woods, and see shooting stars. There wasn't room for her to stay for very long. There were only two bedrooms, and most of the house was crowded with furniture - everything that her mother had brought with her when her father died - nests of tables, clocks, armchairs, knick-knacks, whatnots and statuettes. But Effie had found it an ideal place to recover from her experience at Valhalla, not only the lacerations to her feet, but the shock and disorientation to her soul.

    'My pickup's suffering from tired blood,' said Pepper. 'But I persuaded Norman to drive me over here. I'm beginning to wish I hadn't. He drives like Ben Hur on Prozac.'

    Effie, still hobbling a little in her mother's carpet slippers, led them into the living-room. Her mother was sitting reading by the window, a tortoiseshell cat in her lap. She looked distinctly like Effie: small boned, slightly Italianate, with grey hair pinned back with a mother-of-pearl buckle. As soon as her cat saw Pepper, it jumped off her lap and came trotting across the carpet, climbing on its hind legs up against Pepper's leg. Pepper scratched and tickled it under the chin, and it followed her so closely that it almost tripped her up.

    'You sure have a way with cats,' smiled Effie's mother. 'That one usually runs away when strangers call by.'

    'She can smell the witchery on me,' said Pepper.

    'More like that fish you were cleaning,' put in Norman.

    Effie's mother said, 'You run that herb shop, don't you, down in Cold Spring? I bought one of your spells once, to stop me feeling faint.'

    'Yes,' smiled Pepper. 'Peony root, peony seed, nutmeg and fine sugar. Did it work for you?'

    'The wonderful thing was that it did.'

    Norman said to Effie, as if he'd just remembered an errand he was supposed to have run, 'We're all ready to start stripping the roof. Just thought you'd like to know.'

    'I know. Craig called me yesterday.'

    'Soon as the sale goes through,' Norman added. 'I gotta tell you, I can't wait to get my hands on that place.'

    'Well, don't count on it,' said Effie.

    Norman said, 'Like... I know that Valhalla gives you the creeps. I know you don't like the atmosphere and all. But you have to admit that it's some house, hmh? And when we've finished, it won't be creepy any more. I mean, it's some house.'