“Walter…” Strangeness spun out over the wire from the island. “Did you get the account?”
“No. We didn’t. Listen, I’ll tell you about it when you get here. Come on down, Col. The weather’s fantastic.”
It was as hot as summer on the island, the sun blazing out of a vast blue sky, the surf booming in under a freshening wind. We did not talk about the resort account until we had stocked up on groceries in the shabby little village and I had made us tuna fish sandwiches and we had struck out up the empty April beach.
They had gotten through the presentation, Walter said, and had gone for drinks to the absurd little thatched restaurant on the beach. The official word would not come until the next day, but everyone was full of high spirits and hearty mutual admiration. The development’s president, a squat, fishlike man who had not been in the meeting, joined them. Midway through the first drink he turned to Walter and said, “Walter Kennedy. Walter Kennedy. I think I know someone who knows you.”
“Who’s that?” Walter said.
“Ernie Lipschutz,” the man said neutrally, looking out over his beach to the slice of his sea that was visible through the overhanging thatch. “He was one of our first property owners, has the big contemporary on the beach on the other side of the inn. He was down last week with his family. They came by the house for drinks; his wife was in school with mine. A real go-getter, Ernie is. He mentioned you.”
“Yes,” Walter said. He knew then that the account was gone. Back in his room in the inn, he had called Charlie in and told him about our meeting with Ernest Lipschutz and what had led to it and what had happened in his office. So the brief phone call from the resort’s marketing manager half an hour later had not taken Charlie by surprise. He had said only, “Why don’t you go on down to the cottage and spend a few days? I’ll tell the rest of the crew. We’ll go on back first thing in the morning.”
We talked no more about it except that Walter said, “If the house goes back on the market, Col, and we have to…do something more, I’m not sure I’ll be able to stay with the agency.”
“Charlie wouldn’t expect you to leave,” I said, honestly shocked.
“No. He wouldn’t. He’d let every account we had go down the tube before he’d suggest breaking things off. That’s why I think I’d pull out. There are thirty people who make their living at the agency. Would you mind so awfully?”
“No,” I said, and tears started in my eyes. But they were tears of love.
We stayed the remaining three days, and loved each other in the still-chilled nights under the slightly ratty old thermal blankets and swam in the still-chilled water, and lay in the sun, and bought fat, fresh shrimp from the returning boats at the municipal pier at sundown and boiled them in beer and bay leaves. We took the Sailfish out once, but the wind was still petulant and fickle, running docilely across the water with dimpling fingers and then doubling back and lunging at our stern, so we brought it in. No terror dogged our memories, no portent lay over our days. That time was of and to itself, as whole and round and perfect as an egg. It was only at the weedy, sun-struck little airstrip, when we boarded the frail old DeHavilland that serves the island twice a day, that I had the piercing sense of an impending ending that would, this time, be a final ending.
When we got home, about three o’clock on Sunday afternoon, the lawn of the house next door had been newly mowed and a “For Sale” sign stood beside the mailbox at the edge of the street.
The next morning we called Jay Whitten at People magazine.
26
WHEN THE STORY APPEARED a couple of weeks later the response was swift and ugly, uglier than we could have anticipated. As People stories go, it wasn’t all that sensational; certainly it was not National Enquirer stuff. There was a large photograph of us in our patio chairs looking grave and rather ridiculously well-bred—we had dressed carefully for the photographer in conservative sports clothes, seeking to preserve every small shard of credibility we could salvage—and only a small photo of the exterior of the house next door. Even flattened into black and white banality, it looked full and vibrant and exquisitely dimensional, seeming, as Walter said, to preen for the camera.
The terrible, spiraling saga was all there, but it had not been distorted or personalized, and the only direct quote was one from Walter: “We are telling this story solely to warn the public. We consider this house extremely dangerous and unfit to live in. We have no explanation for what has happened there. Our theory is that there is some sort of voracious, malignant force operating in the house which requires for its sustenance the essence of each person who occupies it. We think it obtains its sustenance by preying on the weaknesses and inherent flaws in the characters of the people who live there. The fact that these incidents may then seem to be explainable in human terms, and the number and sequence of them merely coincidental, makes the house doubly dangerous, in our opinion. If you examine each instance of tragedy you can see that the things that each individual held dearest were taken and turned around and used for his destruction. We do not know what this force is, or how it works, or why. We deeply regret that we may have caused any persons embarrassment or harm in disclosing this story. We have done it in order to prevent far greater harm.”
I thought it a formal and dignified statement. It might as well have been an open invitation from the Manson family to drop in for a tour of the commune.
The cars began arriving early that morning. Do people get up early on People day? Most of the cars slowed down in front of the house next door, paused for a while, slid on to pause before our house, and then drove away. But many of them stopped, and people got out and stood in silent knots at the edge of the lawn, staring solemnly up at the house. Most of the people I saw from my office window that morning were women, many with children by the hand or in backpacks or toting infants in plastic carriers. Some of the older children made elaborate, jeering forays down the driveway toward the house, and their mothers would call them back sharply.
The women wore polyester pants or shifts, and some had fat plastic curlers in their hair. They gazed impassively at the house, and looked with slanting suspicion over at our house and at the other houses on the street, as if knowing their paths would never lead them to streets and houses like this, and resenting it. Once or twice I saw two women murmuring to each other and then looking around at all our houses and laughing. I wondered if they were glad that trouble and sensation could strike here too, among the mailbox names that they had seen in society and financial pages of the newspapers. Some brought out Instamatics and took pictures.
Around midmorning I saw Gwen Parsons’ car come down the street and pause, blocked by slow traffic and parked cars. She backed into the Swansons’ still-empty driveway and turned around and drove off in the other direction, and the crowd on the lawn in front of the house jeered and cat-called. I grimaced in brief pain. I had not thought about the effect of the story on the others on the street. Shortly after that Eloise Jennings came out of her house with two of her children, saw the crowd, and went back in. I knew she would be on the telephone immediately. I wondered maliciously if her own mother and sisters were in the crowd, and then was ashamed at the thought. By afternoon the stream of cars had become a river, and passage was nearly impossible.
Three of my clients called that day and canceled their accounts. I had anticipated it and did not blame them. The severings were polite and unheated.
“You don’t have to explain,” I said to each. “I’d do the same thing under the circumstances. I can recommend two or three good free-lancers if you’d like to keep things on a small scale.”
Walter called shortly after noon. “Is it bad?” he said.
“I guess so,” I said. “At least it’s pretty awful for everybody else on the street. The cars are lined up like Indianapolis; nobody can get through. But nobody’s bothered me so far, no calls from anybody we know. Except that three clients have canceled.”
“You want me to come home?”
>
“No. It doesn’t bother me, except that I hate it for everybody here. How is it there?”
“Very polite. Very jolly. Everybody pretending they don’t read People and nothing ever happened. It can’t go on, though. Charlie has a call on his desk from the Fruitcake King. As soon as he comes in from lunch I’m going to tell him I’m taking a leave of absence until we see how things go so he can truthfully tell clients I’m not around anymore. Then I’ll come home.”
“Are you sorry?” I said.
“No, baby, except for the other people on the street, like you. It’s not as if we didn’t expect something like this.”
“They’re awful people, Walter. The ones who come and gawk, I mean. They’re taking pictures.”
“Well, they aren’t the kind who buy,” he said practically, “and that’s what counts. See you in a little while.”
“Come in the back way.”
With nightfall the traffic abated and the phone calls began. The first was from the realtor who was handling the sale of the house, and I was glad that Walter was there to take it. I could hear the man shouting all the way into the den. He threatened to take us to court. The second was from Norman Greene’s brother in Boston threatening the same thing. Walter was not upset by the realtor’s call; he thought the publicity would net the man a good many serious inquiries among the cranks, and the threat would come to nothing. Norman Greene’s brother bothered him deeply.
“It’s not the possibility of a suit,” he said, coming back into the den gray-faced. “As soon as all this dies down—and it will eventually—I don’t think he’ll want to expose his family to the publicity a suit would bring. He has kids. Even if he does go through with it, it will take a long time, and I don’t know what will have happened by then. It was the pain. He was just…anguished. God, if we’ve done the wrong thing…”
“We haven’t,” I said, going to him and putting my arms around his waist from behind. His back was rigid. “I hate the pain too, but it’s not as though we identified any of the people who lived there. Only the people who knew them well will know who we’re talking about. If we’ve stopped it from selling, don’t you think it will have been worth it? Any amount of pain, what is that to more death?”
“There’s a certain kind of person who’d love to live in that house,” said Walter. “You know the kind; you saw some of them today. What if we’ve lured them there? What if it’s working through us to get people? I couldn’t live five minutes with that.”
My heart froze; I had not thought of that. But then I thought of those sly, faded people, and I said, “Not one of those people could begin to afford that house. The people who could won’t come near it after this. We have to believe we’ve done the right thing, darling. Otherwise nothing is worth anything. If anyone seems serious about it, we’ll warn them—call them, or go see them, or whatever. And if somebody does buy it, they won’t move in right away. We’ll watch very carefully. I’ll watch every day. If the sign comes down, there’ll still be time.”
He twisted around in my arms to look at me intently. “Time for what, Colquitt?”
“Time to go over there during the night and burn it down,” I said. I had not thought of it before consciously, but it had been there in my mind, whole and polished and inevitable.
“Colquitt, we will absolutely and surely go to jail if we do that,” he said.
“I don’t think so. I think if we do that we won’t be alive long enough to go to jail.”
“Won’t be alive?”
“Walter, if you can believe the rest of it, surely you must believe, you must know, that if we destroy it, it will destroy us in turn.”
“Kill us somehow, you mean.”
“Yes. What else would matter enough to us except to—to die, and not have each other anymore?”
“You don’t think it might just separate us somehow for the rest of our lives?”
“No, because we’d still have what we’d been to each other. Even if one of us died, the other would still have that; it would have to kill us, Walter. It’s already shown us that it could. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes,” he said.
It was perhaps a measure of how far we’d traveled down that road we’d taken the night we returned from New York to find the Greenes dead and Claire and Roger gone that we could stand in our bright den, with April throbbing and singing around us outside, and Razz and Foster noisily glomming their dinners in the yellow kitchen, and speak so mildly of arson and death. Perhaps we were mad, had been mad for a long time. Somehow I know that we were not, and are not. No, we are as sane as one can rightfully expect to be in one’s lifetime. We were, that night, simply pared down to one essential inevitability. The madness lay next door.
“If it doesn’t sell, then of course we won’t have to worry about that,” Walter said thoughtfully. “What then?”
“Then, if we’re absolutely sure it won’t sell—if the brother will agree not to sell it ever, or the city condemns it, or it gets struck by lightning or something—I’d kind of like to sell our house and see if Charlie will let us buy his half of the beach house, and go live there, on the island. I’m not sure we’d be safe here even if we stayed completely away from it. But we have to stay until we know for sure one way or another.”
“Yes,” he said. “I see that. The island—that would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“It would be wonderful,” I said peacefully.
The phone rang again; it was a man who said he’d been a Catholic priest but had left the Church to practice white witchcraft and could, for a nominal fee, exorcise the house for us. Walter explained that we did not own it; when the man began to intone thin incantations over the telephone he hung up.
The next caller was a woman who was sure that what was possessing the house was the shade of her departed husband. “He hung around here till I got married again,” she said. “And then I lost him for a while. I’m sure that’s him, though. I’d know the sonofabitch anywhere.”
The next was children, giggling. After that Walter took the phone off the hook.
The slow, frozen ooze of cars did not stop the next day, or the next. Over the weekend, traffic became so congested that the angry realtor brought in an off-duty policeman, and he kept the cars in motion, at least. The lookers, thwarted, jeered and cursed him, and many, wise to the logistics of sensation-watching, parked their cars on other streets and walked to the house. Beer and soft-drink cans and Big Mac boxes littered the mown lawn and drifted over into ours. Kodak boxes and wrappers bloomed like a field of golden poppies; cellophane crackled underfoot like January ice. A large banner was affixed to the “For Sale” sign: “By Appointment Only.” Neither the new sign nor the policeman could stem the tide of older children and the scattering of dull-eyed women who came up through the woods behind the house to peer into the blank windows and break off pieces of shrubbery, to pocket pea gravel from around the plantings at the base of the deck. One fat woman lifted up her children, three in turn, to crane thin necks into a side window; she gave each a methodical whack on the buttocks when she set it down again. Our doorbell rang often, and there were frequent rappings at the front and back doors. Once, going to draw the curtains in the den, I heard a hoarse woman’s voice shout, “There she is! I see her! They’re in there!” This was followed by a veritable fusillade of knocks on the glass of the French door of the kitchen. I fled up the stairs to the bedroom, where Walter was watching a baseball game on the little Sony.
“If you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen,” he said laconically, and, insanely, I laughed. We opened the doors to no one.
We did not stop answering the telephone for two or three more days, though. There was always a chance that some serious buyer might attempt to contact us, and we wished to talk to these people. But none of the calls were from serious buyers, and the ones we took became dimmer and eerier and sicker and slyer, especially during the nights. Finally we stopped answering, and on the fifth day after the sto
ry appeared, Walter, red-eyed and haggard, called the telephone company and got an unlisted number. During the entire week no one that we knew came to our house, and only Eloise Jennings called.
“I hope you’re happy,” she shrieked. “I hope you’re proud of yourselves.” And she hung up.
For a while, in the nights, there would be the sudden sweep of headlights in our driveway, and horns would blare, and people would shout and beat on the sides of cars, and then back crazily out of the driveway. One morning we awoke to find our trees painstakingly laced and webbed with toilet paper. After a horrifyingly loud, heart-stopping three A.M. report that I took to be a shotgun blast but Walter said was a firecracker, Foster Grant came streaking up the bedroom stairs, eyes wild, tail blooming, ears back, fur singed, and from then on we kept the cats shut into the house. A predawn tinkle of glass was the window into the basement at the back of the house. After a couple of windows were broken in the house next door, patrol cars made regular, silent sorties up and down the street, and the nighttime cacophony gradually dwindled to an occasional squall of tires and horns. Our mailbox had been painted with orange obscenities the first night, but we went out to collect the mail only after nightfall, so it did not matter so much. Most of the mail was the type you throw away, face flaming, after reading a sentence or two. We did not go out until the household supplies were depleted, and then we found a twenty-four-hour Colonial many miles away in a scanty, alien shopping center and stocked up as for a siege.
We did not call the police. We hardly even spoke of the daytime invasions and nighttime terrors. We both felt, obscurely, that we must take our medicine—tough it out, endure it. We had known, after all, that there would be reaction. It was the sheer, malevolent gaiety of those faceless invaders that left us weak and sickened behind our closed doors and curtained windows. We had expected alarm and indignation and, certainly, derision. We had not expected primal, hunting joy.
House Next Door Page 28