Pride House: The Quest for Vainglory

by Rob Summers

Chapter 24 Assault of Shadows

  On Thursday morning Doubt went to the sewing room, which overlooked the street, and settled near a window to watch whoever might enter or leave the house. She was waiting for a time when Humility and Reason would be out and old Conscience perhaps napping. When the time came, she and her friends would assail Pride with every means at their disposal.

  She had brought with her a phone and her favorite novel, As I Lay Dying by Faulkner. With the window curtain pulled back slightly, she settled herself to read. She came to the part in which the strange, southern family put cement on the son’s broken leg as a substitute for a cast. Always before she had read this passage with the utmost seriousness, but today it dawned on her that the author might have meant it to be humorous. Her suspicions grew as she read, and it was as if the book were crumbling to dust in her hands. She felt betrayed.

  It was an odd fact that Doubt had never in her life laughed, and though she did not much resent outside attempts to make her do so, she was disturbed when she herself began to see anything as funny. Human life, to Doubt, was burdened with gloomy significance, with tragedy, sacrifices, and pathos. From these barren crags one might only descend to humor—and do so by denying one’s own importance. So she felt a self-betrayal when she admitted the slightest bit of humor to be present in the episodes in her book: the burning barn, the vultures circling over the coffin. She closed the book decisively, obliterating those clowns on the southern landscape.

  She did not know what was becoming of her. Mere physical collapse she had expected for years, perhaps mental too; but of late her tiny frame was becoming the home of strange new thoughts and feelings that seemed to build inside her, rather than decay. If still a girl, she would have called them her growing pains. What they could be at her age, she had no idea. She only knew that she felt mocked, felt as if a crowd of gremlins within her was laughing at the monotony of her self-fixation. What was worse, she had an impulse to join their laughter. Now that was mad.

  The phone rang and she answered.

  “Hello, Mrs. Doubt. Pastor Truth speaking. May I speak to Reason?”

  She tensed. “And what would you like to speak to her about? Miss Reason is not available,” she continued without giving him a chance to reply, “and I would like to ask you not to call her anymore.”

  “Mrs. Doubt,” he responded in a deep, pleasant voice, “you’re upset with me.”

  “And you know why!”

  “Yes,” he said slowly, “because you’re evil.”

  “Good Lord,” she gasped, “what has that got to do with it?” She had not meant it to come out like that. “Pastor, I don’t appreciate being insulted. I’m hanging up now.”

  “I understand, but will you tell Miss Reason that she and Mr. Humility are supposed to be at the embassy at eight o’clock tonight?”

  Doubt’s eyes widened. “Yes, of course, I’ll tell them.”

  “And if you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. Doubt, you need doctoring. I think you should set up an appointment with me.”

  “Oh, of course, Pastor. I always consult itinerant street preachers for my health needs. Now goodby.”

  She immediately rang upstairs to Worry’s room.

  “Hello, Worry? What time has Conscience been going to bed these days? Eight? Good. I don’t want to say too much now, dearest, but I believe this evening may be our Walpurgisnacht.”

  When Doubt looked into the library at eight, she found Pain napping carelessly on the padded window seat, but Pride absent from his usual chair. She went looking for him and in the kitchen found him coming up out of the basement, his face perspiring and his hands begrimed with oily dirt. He went past her unseeing and began to wash his hands at the sink.

  “Pride!”

  He looked at her blankly.

  “What are you doing? Is this another one of your spells?”

  He looked down at his hands. “Uh, I guess.”

  “What have you been doing?”

  “I don’t know,” he said bleakly. “I never know. I’m OK, what do you want?”

  “We require you in the dining room. Come with me.”

  “We? Who is we?”

  “All of us. It’s time for you to make a decision, time to make it with us.”

  Pride followed her to the dining room where Worry and Confusion awaited them.

  “Sit down, dear,” said Doubt. “We want to advise you.”

  “Advise me about what?” He took his chair.

  Doubt nodded to Confusion.

  “You’re hurting, poor dear,” said Confusion, “and we want to help you not to hurt, that’s all. We see you day after day sitting all depressed in that awful, stuffy library when you should be enjoying life. And do you know who’s causing your problem?”

  “Pain,” said Pride with bitter certainty.

  Confusion reached out and touched him with long, lovely fingers. “No, not Pain. It’s these fanatics like Humility and that black pastor and even your own cousin. They’re troubling you with all their cant and dogma about Heaven.”

  “Don’t believe them,” put in Worry stoutly. “You’ll just end up wasting your life on a delusion. That kind of false security is sick. People get brainwashed and they never recover.”

  “I don’t believe them,” insisted Pride. “I mean all this talk about their Christ’s miracles and the streets paved with gold and all. You don’t have to concern yourselves about me.”

  “Then you aren’t considering becoming one of them?” Doubt probed. “You won’t defect to Heaven?”

  “I’ve, uh, considered it. I’m still considering it. But I don’t see how I could swallow all their fairy tale stories if I tried.”

  “Good for you,” said Confusion, patting his hand. “Keep yourself free and unshackled. As Shakespeare said, ‘Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.’“

  “Yes, yes,” said Doubt rapidly, “but remember that we don’t believe in Hell.”

  Confusion smiled like one heavily drugged. “Not at all, not at all,” she soothed. “But we just don’t want to see our Pride end up as a servant to anyone, do we Worry?”

  “Mr. Pride,” said Worry, “if you give that Humility half a chance, he’ll be deciding everything in this house soon. You won’t even have a vote.”

  “I told you I’m OK,” said Pride.

  Doubt took a deep breath and pulled out the legal document. “Dear, you’re not yourself these days. Yes, we know you don’t intend to be fooled, but what with the shocks you’ve had lately, you can hardly trust yourself. Just think, any day now they might talk you into an irretrievable mistake. We only want you to be safe. If you’ll only put the property temporarily in my hands, while you take a rest, then you can’t lose it to them in a moment of weakness. You can’t trust yourself, but you can trust me.”

  Pride looked at her with a mixture of curiosity and surprise. “But the house is all I’ve got to bargain with,” he said. “Ambassador Grace doesn’t want anything else. Look, I just want to be rid of Pain, and I think maybe they can help me. I need help from someone.”

  “But you just said that you don’t believe what they say. You called them fairy tale stories.”

  Slumping on his elbows, Pride noticed a bit of grimy dust ball on one of his shirt cuffs. He flipped it away nervously. “I don’t believe them, I really don’t, but—in a way, wouldn’t it be a relief if we could trust what they say?”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” said Confusion. “Their concept of religion is so narrow and revolting. What it boils down to is a few blind followers fawning before the throne of a conceited Deity who relies on threats of Hell to keep them worshipping Him. Meanwhile all others get to burn forever as punishment for their pluck and independence. Thank God we’re enlightened.”

  Pride smiled weakly. “You think there isn’t any Hell? I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it behind the eyes of people who are accepted as sane an
d admired citizens in this town. The whole system is warped and twisted from top to bottom, but people walk around and do their business and make plans as if it all made sense.”

  “It does make sense,” said Confusion.

  “Sense? What would you know about it? Look at this crazy room! It’s like an art history book with all the pages torn out and pasted up at random. You’re part of the problem, lady. If you tell me not to defect, I’ll know I should do it.”

  “Quiet, quiet,” urged Doubt, taking him by the arm. “Sit down—there. If you really want to defect, of course you will, dear. We’re not trying to tell you what to do. But listen to us, now is not the time to make such an important decision, not when you’re tired and frightened and can hardly trust yourself.”

  Pride said, “What have I got to lose by defecting? I can’t get much worse off than I am now. I’ve even thought of burning the house down on me to end my misery, what’s worse than that?”

  “But you won’t defect yet,” Doubt insisted wheedlingly. “You will wait? What’s your hurry? They’re not moving away, their embassy will always be there. But once you’ve committed yourself, one way or the other, you’ll never, ever be free again. Make a move toward them and you’ll have to spend the rest of your life mouthing dreary hallelujahs to their King. No, they’ll take you any time; not just now, but a month from now, a year from now—whenever.”

  “That’s—true.”

  “Then it’s settled. You’ll keep your freedom. Your freedom is valuable, it’s your treasure. It means you can do as you please. And then—when the time comes to give Heaven a try, and if there’s anything behind it, you can sign up with them and save yourself from any bad consequences of what you’ve done. What could be better? That way you play both sides for all they’re worth.”

  Doubt hid her hands under the table, for they were shaking. Her face was perspiring from her effort.

  Pride said wearily, “Yeah, I guess that’s the plan.”

  “Fine, fine.” Doubt slipped the document off the table. The discussion broke up.

  When she was out of sight of the others, Doubt ran to her brother’s room.

  “Oh, Death, Death,” she said, sinking into a chair beside his bed. “They’re much farther along with him than we thought. We’re holding him by a thread—a thread! Our only hope is that nothing deeply disturbs him and pushes him over the edge.”

  For minutes she sat in the scarcely lighted room, staring at the corpse.

  “I had to concede so much,” she said at last. “I’ve as much as agreed with him that the Heavenites’ honesty is an open question, that their whole story about God and His Son could somehow be true.”

  She shuddered, began to reach out to brush some lint from her brother’s sleeve, and then withdrew her hand. A moment later she was stabbed in the chest with agonizing pain. She rolled out of her chair to the floor where she lay sweating and gasping for minutes. Without any will in the matter, she thought of Pastor Truth’s offer to doctor her.

  When at last the attack was over, she crawled up with her dress and shawl in disarray, feeling fifty years older. She found a mirror and saw that even she had not been truly colorless at normal times, for now she was whiter still—like the whiteness of someone drowned, or so she imagined. She concluded that her illness of the past months had entered a new and final stage. Her heart was progressively failing due to the genetic defect that had already felled her parents and brother.

  Not that her family was quite dead, in the sense of inactivity; she had never believed that. No, they ‘lived their death,’ as Love’s song had put it, and all Doubt’s hopes were in them. For Doubt, too, had a theology in her inmost soul, only it was a Satanology.

  Never before had she thought of all this so clearly.

  “When I die,” she whispered, “I will become like them.”

  Her attention was drawn to her brother’s form on the bed. The outline of his body seemed to be changing. She shook her head, not only to break loose from the clouding of her eyes, but also in firm denial of the abomination the clouding had suggested: his animation by some horrid force, a sort of infernal resurrection. But he lay as before, the mask in place.

  In the hallway, beyond the closed door, one of the servant girls passed, whistling something sprightly and sane, and Doubt felt toward her an absurd thankfulness. She wanted to run out and hug the girl.

  Slowly, with the sweat still on her brow, she left the room.