The Forgiving

by Wesley McCraw

  “Oh, yes. These walls were such a nice sky blue when I was a child.”

  “Did the Cross leave anything behind?” Howard said. “I read about some rituals involving some pretty amazing artifacts.”

  “Anything like that, if it wasn’t hauled away, should be in the cellar.”

  Howard tried to focus on the reality in front of him. Grip and Isabel seemed fine. His extreme apprehension was an emotion. Emotions could be controlled. “Is it all included in the asking price?”

  “Everything is included. It is as it is.”

  The threesome listened to the sounds of the house, not saying anything, not sure whether to wander or whether to wait for Ophelia to lead the way. Grip and Isabel didn’t notice anything wrong with Howard, even as he wiped his wet palms on his pants.

  Isabel noted the newel post and balusters. A hand-carved baby lamb, curled up and sleeping, was nestled at the top of each post. Both lambs looked just birthed as if still covered in mucus. An impressive molded railing led up to the second floor. Gothic crown molding framed the ceiling with arches, spikes, and little crosses. This place is a find, she thought. This place is to die for.

  “How many bedrooms?” she said.

  “I’m not sure. My family only lived downstairs, but I know upstairs is mostly bedrooms, so at least a dozen. Maybe I knew at one time, but it’s been years. This place has never been officially listed. I’ve been waiting for a special buyer.”

  Grip smiled at Howard and Isabel and thought, We're a special buyer. He had already started to daydream about living in the house, the house that Howard thought was an existential horror and that Isabel thought was an architectural diamond in the rough.

  Grip often daydreamed. Ever since he'd been a toddler and his parents had ignored him for their own petty conflicts, he had escaped into his own world. Daydreaming continued throughout his childhood until he dropped out of mind-numbing public school, then burst forth again during his stint in prison in an obsessive orgy of imagination that eclipsed anything before it. Inspired by Our Lady of the Flowers, he created other lives for himself and for the other prisoners, soap operas and horror stories—Early’s death, Early’s love—until fiction and memory blurred together.

  In Jacobi House, he continued to hear Ophelia’s distant voice, “But you three . . . I’d love this place to be a home again.” And it triggered a flight of fancy:

  In just their underwear, their attractiveness on display, the threesome painted the entryway, from floor to ceiling, a blue as bright as the sky. The blue speckled their skin, speckled their joy. Isabel got paint on Howard. Howard chased her with a roller, laughing like a kid. Unlike Grip’s parents, their love would last forever. Their love was special.

  Grip’s mother would slap and hit in a barrage. But one punch from Grip’s father, the strapping boxer, and she would go down for the count. He was like Early. Big. Muscular. Intimidating. Masculine in an often toxic way. He was also like Howard, Grip admitted to himself; but with Howard the similarities were mostly physical. Howard had always been kind, even if he was emotionally closed off at times, even if pain and anger seemed to lurk underneath.

  “Grip?” Isabel called from far away.

  Not theirs yet, the house—they still needed to make an offer. The house would make the past relent. It would wrestle it into submission.

  Grip was alone in the entryway, the room not bright like the sky but dark like the underground. He thought of the Shanghai Tunnels under downtown. Abductions. Crying in the dark. And got a chill. He wanted this place despite his unsettled feeling. The house was dark. Maybe cruel. Maybe even evil. But he was attracted to dark, dangerous things.

  “Grip, get a look at this!” Howard called.

  Grip, now present, rushed to catch up.

  Stained glass cast a chapel living room a deep red. The room—intimate for a church, but huge for a house—occupied the whole southeast corner of the building. Bathed in red, it felt satanic.

  “We could develop photos in here,” Grip said.

  Ophelia flicked a switch.

  Hanging lights flooded the front area with illumination, and a polished dark-wood floor reflected the light back up at a ribbed, vaulted ceiling. In the back was a lower ceiling area furnished with an old-fashioned bar. Richly carved wood paneling encircled the room. Sticks and other dry brush had been piled around. Grip couldn’t fathom a possible reason for this.

  “Do you know if this place was built over the Shanghai Tunnels?” he said, seemingly out of nowhere.

  Howard shook his head, amused. “The Shanghai Tunnels are along the waterfront downtown. They must be like four, five miles from here, at least.”

  Isabel slowly spun with her arms out in the center of the front area. “What would we do with all this space?”

  Ophelia strode over to a fireplace. “The highlight, of course, is this Gothic style mantel. It’s imported from someplace in Europe, I don't quite remember where exactly. Made of hand-carved marble. Exquisite, don’t you think?”

  Isabel expected cherubs or gargoyles, or some other grim detailing, but the carvings on the mantel were abstract and beautiful, almost angelic. The artistry was impressive. On top hung a fractured mirror with a gilded frame, tilted slightly toward the floor.

  “They have a bar!” Grip said.

  Isabel looked at herself in the fractured reflection. “We don’t need a bar.”

  Howard approached Ophelia. “Could you tell us a little bit more about the Cross of the Lamb? Your husband gave his last interview back in the eighties.”

  The fractures of the mirror mixed everyone up; Howard’s arm in one place, his head in another; Grip on both sides of Ophelia, and Ophelia with no head at all. Pieces of Isabel were everywhere. She leaned on one foot and everything shifted, body parts shuffling wildly. Something in the fractures didn’t make sense. She balanced there, as still as possible, trying to understand what she was seeing. A human figure. It wasn’t herself or Howard or Grip or—

  The lights flickered, and the house groaned as if about to swallow them. Grip thought it was an earthquake, but the ground wasn’t shaking. Howard thought it was hell opening up. Before Isabel could turn to see what had reflected in the mirror, the lights went out completely.

  Deep red bathed everything. Terror seized Howard. Isabel was disoriented, as if lost in the mirror. For Grip, it felt like some dark amusement ride.

  Howard realized the red was just light from the stained glass. He cursed himself for being so on edge.

  Isabel’s eyes adjusted to the dark. The figure she'd seen had either left or had never been there in the first place.

  “What the hell was that?” Grip said.

  “Quiet! Listen!” Isabel held out her hands as if to steady herself. The wind moaned outside. Or in the room. It seemed even closer, though. It seemed to originated in her ears. It sounded like words. If she listened hard enough—

  Ophelia pulled open a heavy curtain with a clatter, and light cut through the red gloom. “Come.”

  They dutifully followed her out of the chapel living room, away from the moaning sound, and back through the entry room. Light from a high window highlighted the red paint of the doors at the top of the stairs.

  “Someone liked red,” Grip joked.

  The party continued west through a dark coatroom that had its wallpaper stripped to the plaster underneath. The small room held an oak bench, a long rack of iron coat hooks, and rows of wooden compartments for shoes.

  They continued into the Georgian Revival side of the house.

  Along a front hall, latticed windows faced the front yard. Translucent curtains, stained by time, let in enough light to see two pieces of art that hung on the wall. Both were glass enclosures of dried plants and bird bones arranged in a way that resembled faces.

  Around a corner that turned to the north, three steps descended into a darker hallway. Only after a few moments in the darkness did it become evident that a subtle light emanated from a series of open door
ways on the left. There were open doors on the right too, but it was far too dark to see into those rooms.

  Isabel had imagined a large study or a library on this side of the house. The overly long hallway was less Georgian Revival and more fascist Modernism. Georgian Revival had large open rooms, not long dormitory hallways. Though she could hardly see, the confined hall felt oppressive in its minimalism. She thought of Stalin and of Bauhaus-style Jewish ghettos.

  “This is all wrong,” she said.

  Ophelia halted in front of them, and they all stopped and looked past her. The door at the end of the hall slowly creaked open all by itself to a room with more daylight.

  Grip said in a joke ghost voice, “Go toward the light.”

  No one laughed.

  They pressed on. On the left, light filtered through grimy windows and illuminated random pieces of broken furniture and piles of sticks. In the center of one of the rooms, a precisely stacked pyramid of wooden alphabet blocks stood undisturbed.

  Howard closed the door to the disconcerting scene.

  “What?” Isabel said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  Grip stopped walking mid-hallway and bounced. “The floor is bouncy.” One of the floorboards cracked. He froze. “Whoa.”

  “A few floorboards need to be replaced,” Ophelia said. “Nothing substantial.”

  They reached the end of the lower hall and entered a workroom at the back corner of the house, the first room to be obviously dusty. Odds and ends filled the ten by ten-foot space: old cans of paint, pieces of wood, rusty circular saw blades, and an ax, among other miscellaneous items. The middle of the room had a workbench fitted with a rusty vice. Windows overlooked an overgrown and mostly dead back garden. A filthy glass door connected the workroom to a greenhouse attached to the back of the building.

  This is the northwest corner of the house, Isabel thought, trying to get a mental picture of the layout. We're on the opposite corner from the chapel. She didn’t want to get lost.

  Howard ran his finger along the sharp edge of the ax.

  “All work and no play . . .” Grip said.

  Ophelia creaked open an electrical box on the wall and flipped a few breaker switches. “Try the lights.”

  Isabel flicked a switch near the hall door. Fluorescent workroom lights flickered on after a few noisy fits and starts.

  “The storm must’ve blown the breaker,” Howard said.

  In single file, they headed back down the lower hall. Isabel held back, the last to exit the workroom; lights shone along the ceiling of the hall, a neat dotted line, but darkness still filled the rooms to either side. She didn’t want to go back through there.

  “God,” she said to no one. While the hall looked better in the light, it still resembled a socialist ghetto in Eastern Europe. She imagined the scrawled spray-paint graffiti of roaming delinquents, and there, a drunk passed out (maybe dead) on the floor. She could almost hear crying from a baby in the distance.

  Nothing much here inspired this, just a hall with whitewashed walls and ceiling, wooden floorboards spread beneath. And yet, she still imagined the baby crying, which no longer seemed just in her head.

  She remembered Alex in her classroom saying, “They all lose their babies to the House of Skulls.” They all lose their babies . . . She had pressed him to explain. He had sat there, acting innocent.

  In the corner of one of the dark rooms, a tall figure stood just out of the light from the hall. The light reached the tips of a pair of boots. No, she thought. There is no one there. My imagination is playing tricks. She reached into the room and felt for a light switch.

  The rest of the group walked on. Panic rose as she searched. She finally found the switch and flicked on the light.

  The tall figure was a roll of carpet propped in the corner and a pair of worn-out work boots.

  Grip came back to see what was keeping her. “Izzi?”

  “It’s nothing. I just . . .” Why was the house making her so uneasy? Maybe subconsciously all the ghost talk had affected her somehow.

  “I’m here.” Grip got close. His presence didn’t make her feel safe. She worried for him too. “You think he’ll ever tell me?” he asked her.

  She instinctively knew what Grip referred to. “He wants you to live with us. He loves you. It’s just not a word he uses.” She turned the light back off. A killer stood in the dark in those work boots. The creepy image irritated her more than scared her. It was irrational.

  Grip mistook her distress to be about Howard. “Has he told you? That he loves you, I mean.”

  “Come on.” She would start crying if she stayed down in the lower hall another minute. “I don’t like it down here.” She pulled Grip along with her.

  “Has he?”

  “Twice. And the first time didn’t count.”

  Grip stopped with his back to the open doorway to one of the dark rooms. “Why didn't it count?”

  “It was the first thing he said to me. I’m not sure what came over him.”

  “That’s easy. You did.” He smiled at her, and it would have been a touching moment if the darkness wasn’t looming behind him. She feared it would steal him away. Which was silly. She was being silly.

  “Why did you two never get married?” he asked her.

  “Do you want to be like your parents?”

  “Hell no!”

  “Well, me neither.”

  Even though she had forgiven her father years ago, she still hated him. Her mother, Magdalena, shouldn’t have gotten pregnant again; they had known the risks. Things had inevitably gone wrong, and Isabel had begged them to see reason, but the man of the household had the last word. “Wives should obey their husbands in everything, just as the church people obey Christ.” Magdalena—always quiet, always subservient, always God-fearing—had developed severe preeclampsia. Her liver had shut down, and she died of a stroke. The mortal sin of abortion could have saved her life. Instead, mother and fetus had died six months into the pregnancy. Isabel resolved to never fall for that blind conservatism herself. Never get married, that was her resolution, a reminder to herself that faith had limits. The sacred institution of marriage could go to hell.

  She shoved Grip onward down the hall.

  “Okay-okay,” he said.

  They ascended the three stairs and made their way around the corner, down the front hall, and through the coatroom. They failed to notice that above them, the coatroom’s high ceiling was plastered with pictures of Jesus with his eyes scratched out.

  7

  Things Lost, Things Found

  Isabel and Grip reached the chapel living room, where Ophelia and Howard waited for them.

  Grip's expression of wonder at the still-impressive space helped Isabel let go of the dread and apprehension caused by the lower hall. They would see the rest of the house without incident, and her baseless foreboding would be dispelled.

  Ophelia and Howard stood together as if they didn’t want to be in the same house, let alone in the same room. Isabel wondered what Howard was thinking but hesitated to ask. She didn’t want to admit to herself that maybe Grip was right to worry. Maybe Howard was having second thoughts about buying a house.

  In the low-ceiling area by the old-fashioned bar, Howard, the tallest of the group, reached and touched the ceiling. Grip ran his hand along the bar that would look at home in an Old Western. Behind it, a swinging door led into the kitchen. “Ladies” and “Gents” restroom doors were along the back wall.

  “This room was first the saloon of a parlor house,” Ophelia continued. “The ladies room was added during prohibition. After that, the Cross of the Lamb used this chapel for services. My husband would stand right there and preach salvation. I can still picture it as clear as day.

  “Now come along,” she said. “Don’t split up like that.”

  They followed her into a windowless dining room with an impressive oak dining table and mosaic tile floor. On the table stood a cut-glass vase with a single dried ros
e.

  Each person had a different reaction to the room.

  A few months ago, Isabel had toured a Victorian house on NW Johnson Street. A charming and precocious girl on the tour had delighted in everything as if the place had been a giant dollhouse. And then her delight had changed to fear for what seemed like no reason, and she kept crying and repeating, “The shadow man, the shadow man.” Her parents, a young hipster couple, had held, soothed her, and finally carried her out of the house. Nothing else odd happened on the tour, but a darkness had followed Isabel the rest of the week. Her mood had been volatile and her period had been late. She prayed each night that she wasn't pregnant. Her period finally came, and the darkness passed. This dining room reminded her of that tour, of the shadow man, and of those dark days that followed.

  For Howard, the room was a window into the past. He pictured it furnished and lived-in, as if looking at a long forgotten photograph. Ophelia Jacobi, thirty years younger, sat at one end of the table, and her husband sat at the other. Plates lined the outer rim, around produce harvested from the backyard. This was a religious holiday only celebrated by the Cross of the Lamb, three days before All Hollows’ Eve. The Day of Harvest.

  Grip focused in on the dried rose in the vase. “Young love, red rose,” the florist had said. What did a black rose signify? Grip lifted the rose from the vase and presented it to Isabel.

  “I want you to know I love you,” he said, purposefully not glancing at Howard.

  Self-conscious, Howard looked away. Grip was so liberal with his words. For Howard, a declaration of love had baggage. His parents had said, “I love you,” but what had that meant? To them, love was sacrifice. Love had to be more than that. It just had to be.

  “Love” out of his mouth would be like a curse.

  Isabel, trying to forget the crying girl in the house on NW Johnson Street, took the rose, smelled the brittle bloom, and acted as though it had a wonderful scent. “You tell me all the time.”

  Howard untied the three-bead necklace hidden by his shirt. “Just once, I'd like to be the one that gets the flowers.” He threw it to Grip, who snatched it from the air.