House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Colquitt, you sit here and you ask me to believe that the house next door is…haunted or something. Don’t you see that I can believe anything but that? Anything—bad luck, flaky neighbors, magnetic fields, noxious vapors, whatever godawful accident of natural laws and physical phenomena that might explain some of that stuff over there—yes, I can swallow any of that crap if I have to. But not that there is a malignant intelligence working in a house that’s less than a year old, on this street, in this neighborhood. Colquitt, if I believed that, then I could not function in this world anymore. Nothing would mean anything anymore, nothing would make any sense. There just wouldn’t be any core to my life or the world. I’d just have to go to bed and stay there the rest of my life, because I couldn’t trust the world anymore. I won’t buy it. I will not buy that.”

  I whirled on him. “Have you forgotten that I betrayed you in that house with Kim Dougherty? Betrayed you, when the only thing in this world that matters to me is you and the life we have? Have you forgotten that you came within an inch of killing us both? What did it almost take from us, Walter? Only each other. You know what it can do, you know what it did do, you know what it will do if we…mess with it. How can you sit there and say you won’t buy it, for God’s sake? What more is it going to take?”

  He was silent. His body was heavy and his face was old, old. Finally he said, “I don’t know what I think any more, Colquitt. All I know is that I will not let you destroy yourself over it. If we have to, we’ll sell this house and move somewhere else.”

  “Then aren’t you as good as admitting that there is something wrong over there?” I said, hating my own probing voice.

  “All right, yes, then, goddammit, Colquitt. I think there is something funny over there. But I also think there’s some sort of natural, physical explanation for it, because I will not believe that—that other thing. I cannot believe it and continue to exist. Coincidence is a natural law too, and right now I’m content to leave it at that. What could we do, anyway? What on earth do you think we could do about it, aside from moving? Do you really want to move?”

  “No, I—no. I don’t want to move. I just don’t want anything more to happen to anybody over there. I want everything to be like it was. We could warn people, Walter. We could tell people what we think—what I think, if you don’t want to be involved in it. Your position could be, ‘Well, Colquitt has got this bee in her bonnet, and I’m just going along with her till she gets her head straight. Please do me a favor and humor her.’”

  “Honey, what on earth good do you think it will do, if people think you’re off your tree?”

  “At least they’d know. They could make up their own minds then. At least, they’d have heard—”

  “Whom do you propose to warn? Everybody on the street and in town, probably, knows pretty much what’s gone on over there. You wouldn’t be telling anybody anything they didn’t know already, except…that last thing with Virginia and Buck. And what happened to us. Do you want to tell people that?”

  “No, of course not. You know we couldn’t do that. But we could warn the people who didn’t know, anybody else who might want to move in there,” I said.

  He sighed, his brow furrowed with frustration. “Colquitt, you can’t stop people from living where they want to. You can’t go telling people who come looking at that house that it’s haunted. They’d think you were crazier than a loon. It wouldn’t stop anything. What are you going to do, greet everybody who comes to look at it and snatch them over here and tell them all about the haunted house? Besides the fact that the realtors or somebody could probably take legal action against you, nobody would believe you. When you spell it out, it sounds like two sets of very bad luck. Just that. Besides, how do you know the Sheehans will sell it? Maybe she’ll be better, maybe they’ll come back.”

  “Do you really think so, Walter?”

  “I guess I don’t,” he said.

  “What do you think we ought to do, then?”

  “I think we ought to sit tight and hope it never goes on the market again. I think we ought to try and forget it. All of it. Okay, just for the sake of the argument, say you’re right and something supernatural is going on over there, there’s something feeding on people—maybe, if it’s empty long enough, if it doesn’t get the…the nourishment it needs, then whatever it is will just die. I don’t know what’s the matter with the damned house. I just know that if you go on this way about it much longer you’re going to be ill. You’re a strong woman, Colquitt. You’ve got judgment and strength of will—you’re going to have to use them now. Use them or get some professional help in dealing with this.”

  “You think I really am losing my mind, then.”

  “Not in the slightest. It might give you some perspective on this to talk it out with somebody besides me or the neighbors. Somebody qualified. That’s all I meant. I just want you to be yourself again, honey. That’s all I want.”

  “It isn’t in me, Walter. What if somebody does buy it and things start happening again?”

  “We’ll worry about that when it happens. If it happens.”

  “You know, Walter,” I said, “we’ve never stuck our necks out. We’ve never put ourselves or anything we really value on the line. We’ve taken the best life has to give—and it’s been good, it’s been very good—and we really haven’t given anything back. I wonder if this isn’t the one crack we’re going to have at it? The one chance we’re going to have to…repay life, somehow.”

  “I don’t think I’m afraid to put myself on the line, Col,” he said. “I’d hate to think I was. But when I do, I want it to be for something more profound than a pile of rocks and boards and masonite. Pretty as it is.”

  “The pretty is part of it of course,” I said. “That’s its draw. That’s the bait.”

  “Well, blame Kim Dougherty for that. I guess you’ll be telling me next he’s touring Europe on a broom.”

  We said nothing. I guess I had known we wouldn’t. All that late summer and into September the house lay quiet. Weeds spiked up around its foundation; the yard went brown and burned in the dry heat. Once Margaret Matthieson, who’d handled the sale of the house to the Sheehans, came over to ask if we’d heard what they planned to do about it. I said I didn’t know.

  “It looks like God’s Little Acre,” Margaret said, “but we haven’t gotten any instructions about keeping it up or anything. If they’re going to sell, I wish they’d let us know. Of course they could be handling it through another firm, but you’d think—and I’d have heard, anyway. Funny.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  There was a good bit of talk in the neighborhood this time. At parties, at the club, at the various auxiliary meetings I went to, heads invariably leaned together and the Sheehans and the house were discussed. So was the Guthries’ sudden cruise. Eyes would go to me, waiting for some comment, some explanation. You were there, the eyes said. You must know something. When I offered no comment the eyes would slide away. People on the street did not seem quite so open to me as they had been, but perhaps I was imagining that. The small coolness between me and Claire was still there, buried under chattings and droppings-in at each other’s houses. There were not so many of those now. I was heavy with the sorrow of it, and the loss, but remained silent. Once, at the end of an evening down the street at the Parsons’, when we’d all stayed too late and drunk too much, Claire had suddenly stretched out her hand to me and said, with tears in her brown eyes, “Col. Col.” I almost took her aside then and told her about Kim and Walter and me, about Buck and Virginia Guthrie, about what I thought, the whole thing. But then I only hugged her.

  So the distance remained.

  Early that October Marguerite Condon came down and supervised the loading of the Sheehans’ furniture into a van, and was gone again by the time I got home from work. Claire told me she’d seen her and the van, but had not gone over, and Marguerite had not called or come by her house.

  Later that month I quit my job and moved
my files into the upstairs office I’d been readying all that fall and began my work at home. I had, as Anita Sheehan had suggested, angled my desk in front of the dormer windows, facing away from them, and I did not often look into the blazing foliage that half shielded, half framed the house next door. I was absorbed and busy with my new clients and charmed with the novelty of working at home and the weekday ambience of the house and street. It was a microcosmic world that had spun around my house all along while I had been away downtown, and I had never tasted it. It was a little strange, but exhilarating too.

  At the end of October a “For Sale” sign went up in the yard of the house next door. A different realty firm this time.

  A card came from Kim Dougherty, from Florence. He was immersed in study at the Uffizi, he said, spending long hours every day there in that rich old dimness. He’d begun to help a little, in a very unofficial capacity, with restoration work. He was enjoying it, he said.

  PART THREE

  The Greenes

  18

  NOT SO MANY prospective buyers came to see the house this time. I know, because all during the early days of November I was working in my upstairs office, my coffee pot hissing cheerfully, the classical FM station on my radio weaving a soft shroud of serenity and grace and symmetry around the warm, bright room. I was in and out of the house a lot during those first weeks at home too, dashing to radio and TV stations, dropping off press releases, meeting with clients and prospects at their offices. I’d have noticed if many people came to see the house. But there weren’t many—several very young couples, wistful and careful-faced with the wanting of the house—lookers only, I knew. There was not the aura of money about them that had clung to Pie and Buddy.

  At Thanksgiving the rotten cold I had lied about back in the summer, when I was hiding from our neighbors after that last ghastly incident in the house, struck me in earnest. It hung on and on, lodging finally and firmly in my lungs, and I coughed and rasped and rattled and ran a low-grade fever, and lost sleep and weight. I finished up the last of the outstanding work I had to do on my new accounts before Christmas, and since I knew that things would be slow until after the first of the year, and Walter’s agency had drifted into its annual holiday hiatus, we called the young man who feeds the cats and waters the plants and brings in the mail while we’re away, and we packed up and went down to the old white inn in Ocho Rios, where we’d spent our honeymoon.

  I am a Christmas addict, a confirmed tradition buff, and I have always hated the idea of the holidays spent in some lush, vivid place of tropical feverishness. We’d never been away from home at Christmas since our parents died. But this year it was right, it was healing. We were so totally away. The white sun and the incredible blue-green-purple water and the insistent soft trade winds washed the misery out of my chest and the heavy, lingering dread out of my heart.

  We ate fish and seafood and chowder at lunch, and stodgy, stomach-boggling British dinners of roast beef and lamb and Yorkshire pudding and potatoes. I gained five pounds and lost the haunted, shadowed look around my eyes, and the lines around Walter’s mouth and on his forehead smoothed out under the new tan. We both slept enormously in the still, hot afternoons, in the sudden, thick, total tropical darkness. We laughed and capered and made love and played like clumsy puppies at Dunn’s River Falls, and moved politely but blindly among the young, determinedly worldly honeymooners and the elderly couples from Canada and the Midwest, who flocked to meals on the veranda or lounge chairs on the beach or around the bar before dinner. Among them we regained some of that special, secret sense of us-ness that we had always had among strangers. It lay between us on the air like a cat’s cradle of invisible cords. We did not, this time, look up any of the acquaintances we had on the island.

  Once, when we were dressing for dinner in the graying light of the abrupt tropical dusk, Walter called in from the balcony, where he was watching the sinking sun turn the sea to dull-silver foil, “Right now, at this very moment, the first people are trudging into Eloise’s Christmas party. Semmes is bellowing, ‘Yule, y’all!’ to Roger, and Claire is heading for the bar, and the littlest angel has dropped a dog turd into the eggnog. Or one of his own.”

  “Yuck,” I said, scratching at a patch of peeling sunburn on my collarbone and noting with satisfaction that the ridge of bone did not stand away in such stark, lunar relief now.

  “Has it really been that long since the last one? It seems like just last week.”

  I remembered then that we had been talking about Pie Harralson’s miscarriage at precisely this time last year, and that all the trouble had been yet to come. I wanted, suddenly and bleakly and desperately, to be back at that year-ago party, at the point in time and space before it had happened, to take different routes and choose different paths, to escape our own recent pasts. I remembered that after my father died I would wake up in the mornings and I would not remember for a moment that we had lost him, and then when I did, it was not so much anguish that I felt as a simple child’s desire to be back in the time before he died. I felt like that then, in that Jamaican twilight.

  “I don’t want to go home,” I said desolately. “I don’t want to go home.”

  Walter came and put his arms around me and rested his chin on the top of my head. The familiar gesture started a sting of tears in my nose. I turned my face away so I would not get mascara on his jacket.

  “I thought you were feeling better,” he said.

  “I was. So much better, and then it all came back. Maybe we were wrong to come down here. It’s just going to be worse when we get home.”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “Not if we can keep this perspective we’ve gotten. That’s what we have to do, Col. Remember how unimportant and sort of ludicrous it all seemed while we were here, away from it. Just not give in to it anymore. If we can lose it like this when we’re away from it, don’t you think that means it was mostly in our own heads? We can handle our own heads.”

  “I guess so. You can yours, anyway. I’m not sure about mine. But I’ll try. Maybe you’re right, and it won’t sell.”

  But when we got back to our house a week later, shivering with the strangeness of remembered summer in the cold, wet wind, the “For Sale” sign was gone and there were two cars in the driveway, and a child’s blue bicycle, and lights burned once again from the replenished windows of the house next door.

  We were spared the travesty of the welcome-to-the-neighborhood visit to Susan and Norman Greene by Claire, who brought them by the afternoon after we got back. I was taking the last of the summer clothes out of the dryer in the utility room off the kitchen when there was laughter and the stamping of feet on the back porch and a sharp rapping of knuckles on glass. I let them in, feeling no curiosity, only dull fatigue and a sullen resentment at having to welcome new people into my kitchen and my life again. Walter had been right; the house and its terrible short history seemed to have lost its hold on me. I had indeed left the terror and the heavy tumor of foreboding in the vivid sea of that summer island. But what was left was not the lightness I had yearned for, only this stale, tired emptiness.

  Claire thrust the three newcomers into the kitchen, a man, a woman, and a little girl of about eight, then hugged me briefly and turned to them.

  “This is Susan and Norman Greene, and Melissa,” she said. “And this is Colquitt Kennedy, who has been frying her considerable body in Jamaica for two weeks while the rest of us were freezing our behinds and cursing Santa Claus. Not really, honey,” she appended, looking at Melissa Greene, who looked back at her gravely and acceptingly. We laughed, or rather Susan Greene and I did, because it was such a Claire thing to say. The man did not.

  “Hello, Susan, Norman and Melissa,” I said. “It’s good to meet you. How long have you been in?”

  “Hello,” said Susan Greene. “Precisely one week. And it’s still the biggest mess you ever saw. I just can’t seem to get hold of it.”

  She was younger than Claire or me, about tw
enty-eight or-nine, I thought, but except for the discrepancy in their ages, she was almost a replica of Claire. Her crop of curls was sandy and wiry and her eyes were blue, but there was the same sturdy squareness, direct grin, snub nose, neat waist and short, muscular legs. The same air of earthiness, faint irreverence, and general competence. And yet there was something fragile and tentative there. Her small daughter, who had gone quietly into the den and was regarding a wary Foster Grant with polite interest, had the same air of fragility.

  “Susan is a gal after my own heart,” said Claire, giving Susan Greene’s shoulder her characteristic little hug. “I’ve been in my house precisely sixteen years and it’s still the biggest mess you ever saw. I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  Looking at the two women standing together in the warm light of my kitchen, with sleet ticking ominously at the French doors and the wind rising outside, I thought it probably was the beginning of a friendship. A real friendship, one of Claire’s few deep and abiding and totally open friendships. They seemed so alike. They seemed already close and easy and comfortably offhand, as you do well into a good friendship. I felt a jolt of coldness somewhere deep in my stomach, which crept toward my heart. The dread I had thought I had left in Jamaica came flooding back, mature and heavy. Presentiment hung thick and almost palpable in my kitchen once again. I thought swiftly and clearly: This is dangerous. This woman is dangerous to Claire. This friendship must not bloom. This alliance must be broken.