The House That Jack Built (5 page)

    They crept round one hairpin after another, but at last the trees began to thin out and the road was dappled with sunlight. A faded board by the roadside said
Red Oaks Inn, 200 yards. Open Hearths & TV.

    The inn looked much smaller than Effie remembered it, and it wasn't just closed, it was half tumbled down. It was set in a clearing on the left-hand side of the road, overshadowed by giant oak trees, an empty clapboard building with a sagging verandah and a skeletal roof. Most of the windows had been broken, and the gutters were filled with landslides of weather-bleached shingles.

    Craig turned the car into the parking-lot, and tugged on the handbrake. 'Looks like lunch is off,' he said. 'Where shall we go to now?'

    Effie climbed out of the car and walked up to the inn's front steps. Nineteen years ago, climbing these steps with her father, she never would have believed that she would ever come back here, to find the inn looking like this. She stepped up to the front doors, and peered inside. The doors had once had panels of decorative stained glass, through which she could peer while she was waiting for her parents to finish paying the bill or powdering their noses or whatever it was that parents did to drag each minute beyond the bounds of endurance. She used to imagine that each pane of coloured glass gave her a secret view of a world which was never normally visible: a red world, a green world, and a sickly amber world.

    Once - through the red glass - she had seen a man in a homburg hat walking across the parking-lot. When she had looked through the clear glass, he had vanished.

    She heard the car door slam behind her as Craig came up to join her. The front doors were chained and padlocked, but she could clearly see through to the dining room, with its view of the stream that ran down the rocks at the back, although the stream was clogged with grass now and there was no furniture in the room except for a single tilted-over chair.

    'Memories, hmm?' said Craig, looking up at the dilapidated roof.

    She nodded. 'Dad took me here on my eighteenth birthday.'

    Craig unexpectedly laid his hand on her shoulder, and gave it a squeeze. Effie turned and looked at him, but his head was turned.

    'I like it here,' he said, almost as if he couldn't believe it himself.

    'I'm pleased. I always did. There were two lovely people who used to run it, Mr. and Mrs. Berryman. They loved cooking and they loved making people feel contented and happy. Mrs. Berryman used to let me go into the kitchen and make pastry-people.'

    They went back down the steps. In the distance, they could see the blueish peaks of the Hudson Highlands, and the darker cloud-cloaked outline of Storm King Mountain. They could have been alone in the world, here by this deserted and broken-down inn, explorers of a long-lost civilisation. Whippoorwills called sadly from hill to hill.

    'Did you ever go up as far as Valhalla?' asked Craig.

    She shook her head. 'We came up here to eat, we ate, we went home. Dad was always promising to go for a walk in the woods, but he never did. He was always too full.'

    'I'd like to see what Valhalla is.'

    'It's just somebody's house.'

    'All the same, I'd like to see it.'

    Effie said, 'Okay.' She didn't mind what they did, so long as Craig remained as affable as this. He hadn't been so relaxed since the day before his 'accident', and she was beginning to think that this enforced vacation was really going to work.

    This morning, he had dressed in a camel-coloured linen suit, with a sky-blue shirt, a city dweller's ultimate concession to the countryside. But now he stripped off his coat and rolled up his sleeves and twisted open two more shirt buttons. 'I shouldn't have worn these goddamned loafers,' he said. 'I'll see if I can pick up some Timberlands when we get back to Cold Spring.'

    'You? In Timberlands?'

    He grinned, and patted her on the back. 'I'm on vacation, I'm allowed.'

    Up above the Red Oaks Inn, the gradient was so steep that Craig had to shift down into 2. But after a few minutes of laboured climbing, the road began to level out, and described a gradual left-hand loop to follow the upper contours of the hill, between slopes of tawny dried-out grass and nodding, undernourished wildflowers.

    They were so high up now that the wind began to fluff and whistle through the open windows. As they reached the crest of the hill, a thick barrier of hunched old oaks came into view, like an army of ogres rising to their feet. Although they were all mature, these oaks, most of them were so exposed to the weather that they had grown stunted and deformed, and several had been dramatically split apart by lightning strikes. But they formed a natural barrier from one side of the hill to the other, so that Effie could only imagine what lay beyond them. When she was a child, she had thought it was quite romantic for somebody to name their house Valhalla, but now when she was here, now she was actually standing in front of its gates, it seemed unsettling and perverse.

    The house might just as well have been named Purgatory; or Mictlampa, which was the Mexican land of the dead, where skeletons danced. Her parents' housemaid Juanita had told her all about Mictlampa, when she was little, and the memory of those stories still made her shiver.

    'This is so spooky,' she said.

    But Craig kept on driving with a look on his face that was almost one of dawning recognition. 'It's fantastic. I love it.'

    The road surface deteriorated into broken asphalt and shingle, with weeds and grass growing through it, but Craig continued to follow it at the same speed as it curved around the trees, even though it looked as if it came to a dead end. Past the last stand of oaks, however, a pair of tall wrought-iron gates came into view, sagging between two tall stone pillars. Craig drew the BMW right up to the gates, and stopped.

    'This must be it,' he said. 'Valhalla.'

    In places, the wrought-iron was rusted through, and the pillars were pockmarked and spotted with lichen. But all the same, the gates were gaunt and deeply impressive, as whoever had raised them had obviously intended them to be.

    Beyond here, these gates said, you are trespassing on land that belongs to me.

    Craig climbed out of the car and looked around. The summer wind whipped the grass around his ankles. Effie climbed out, too, her denim dress flapping.

    'What a place to have a house,' she said. 'Can you imagine trying to get up here in the winter?'

    Craig limped up to the gates and shook them. The left-hand gate had rusted completely off its hinges, and the bottom rail was buried in the shingle, but it would probably be possible to swing open the right-hand one. Beyond the gates, the road curved off to the right and down the other side of the hill, and so it was impossible to see anything but more trees.

    'I feel like…' Craig suddenly began, and then stopped, and looked around some more.

    'What do you feel like?' Effie prompted him.

    'I don't know. It's really strange. I feel like I was meant to come here.'

    She thought of his 'accident', and his repeated denials that destiny had guided him to the darkened doorway of K-Plus Drugs. Yet here he was, trying to suggest that destiny had brought him here.

    'You're feeling relaxed, that's all,' she told him. 'Your mind's off-guard. It's kind of like
deja vu
.'

    'No, no,' he said, shaking his head. 'It's not like
deja vu
at all. I don't have any feeling that I've been here before. I can't explain it. I just feel that I was meant to come.'

    Effie took hold of the gate, and tried shaking it, too, but it didn't even rattle. 'You may have been meant to come, but you sure weren't meant to go inside.'

    Craig paced up and down for a few moments. 'We could try pulling them open with the towrope.'

    'Craig... are you kidding me? This is somebody else's property. We could be sued. Besides, I don't want you ruining my car. Supposing you strained the engine? Supposing one of the gates fell onto the back of it?'

    'Okay, okay. Just an idea.'

    Effie stood watching him for a while. He seemed extraordinarily agitated, yet pleased, too, because he kept chivvying the palms of his hands together, the way he always did when he was excited or inspired.

    'What is it?' She took hold of his arm, and his face was radiant. 'Tell me what it is.'

    He grasped her shoulders, and then he hugged her close, really hugged her, for the first time since he had left home on the morning of March 16. Effie was so surprised and touched that she suddenly felt as if she had burrs in her throat, and her eyes filled up with tears. It had been so long since he had spoken with any affection at all, let alone showed it, that she was overwhelmed.

    'I was meant to come here,' he repeated. 'I don't know how, or why. But it's like hearing music, almost.'

    'Music?' Effie was moved, but completely baffled.

    He released her from the hug, but he still kept hold of her hands.

    'I can't explain it. I just can't explain it. But do you know what it's like, when you're passing somebody's house, on a summer afternoon, and they've opened all the windows, and you can hear music playing? Dance music, do you know what I mean? Dance music - tango, foxtrot, that kind of thing. And you think to yourself, I wonder what memories this is conjuring up, for the person who's listening to it. Is it happy, or is it sad? Maybe they danced to this music with somebody who's dead. Maybe they never had anybody to dance with.'

    'Craig,' said Effie, half-pleased and half-concerned. He had delighted her, with this sudden burst of affection, but he had alarmed her, too. She had never heard him talking this way before, even when they were first married.

    'It's all right,' he said. 'Everything's fine. Everything's going to be fine.'

    After a while, they climbed back into the car, and he started the engine. He turned around in his seat to back the BMW along the road. Effie took a last look at the rusting gates. They reminded her of Edward Gorey's drawings; the sort of sinister Gothic gates that might have been familiar to
The Dwindling Party
or the
Gashlycrumb Tinies
('A is for Amy who fell down the stairs').

    'We must be able to find out whose property this is,' said Craig. 'One of those realtors in Cold Spring should know.'

    'What does it matter whose property it is?'

    'I want to see it, that's why it matters.'

    'I expect it's all run down, just like the Red Oaks Inn.'

    'I want to see it, is that such a bad thing?'

    'No, no, of course not,' said Effie. She didn't want to upset him now that he was being so effervescent. If it took a visit to some derelict old house to lift him out of his trauma, then terrific.

    They had almost backed up to the point where Craig could turn the car around when she saw something moving, beyond the gates, where the oaks were darkest. It could have been nothing at all, a stray flicker of sunlight through the leaves. But she was sure that it was a figure; a very slim pale figure dressed in white or cream, watching them go.

    She didn't know why, but the sight of this figure alarmed her out of all proportion. She opened her mouth to say something to Craig, but then the figure was gone, or dissolved, or vanished. She suddenly thought of the man in the homburg hat she had seen through the red stained glass segment of the window at the inn.

    Red world, green world, and sickly amber world. Perhaps there was another world, too. A world glimpsed through closed gates and half-closed doors. A world where dance music was always heard through other people's open windows. She looked at Craig and he looked back at her, and she wondered if she had actually understood what he meant.

    

    

    She opened her eyes. Somebody was standing at the end of the bed, watching her. A bulky, shadowy shape, its eyes glistening in the darkness. She was clutched with such fright that she couldn't breathe, couldn't speak. She tried to whisper, 'Craig' and reach out for him, but her voice wouldn't work and her hand wouldn't do anything but grip the sheet.

    'Sweetheart?' said the shape, all of a sudden. 'Are you awake?'

    She let out an exhalation of relief that was practically a scream. 'God, you scared me! God, you almost gave me a heart attack!'

    He came around the end of the bed and sat down close to her. He was wearing his white cotton pyjama pants, but that was all. He gently held her wrists and kissed her on the forehead. 'I'm sorry. I couldn't sleep.'

    'I thought you were a ghost or something.'

    'A ghost, weighing 200 pounds?' He kissed her again.

    'Do you want a Nytol?' she asked him.

    He shook his head. 'I don't feel like sleeping. I feel like I've just woken up.'

    'What do you want to do, then? Play Scrabble?'

    'I know this sounds crazy, but I thought I might drive back to Valhalla.'

    'Well, I don't mind. But I thought you were going to talk to a realtor first.'

    'I can't talk to a realtor at three-thirty in the morning.' Effie propped herself up on one elbow. The sheet slid down, and her breasts were bare. 'You want to drive back there now?'

    'I don't know. I have the urge to, that's all. I never felt this way before. It's like, if I go there, I'm going to find the answer to all of my problems.'

    'Oh, Craig, that's impossible. We can't. I don't mind going back with you in the morning, when it's light. But not now.'

    He sat up straight. For a moment she was afraid that she might have lost him again; that he was going to lose his temper. But then he nodded, and nodded again, and said, 'You're right. We'll talk to the realtor first, then we'll go back.'