by Jack Finney
I suppose so.
She smiled wonderingly. Strange, isn't it, to think that this house existed before? Right here in Darley, undoubtedly, maybe in sight of this one.
If it existed.
She looked at me for a moment, her face dead serious. Then, with such quiet certainty that I smiled in surprise, she said, It did.
Oh? How do you know?
Ellie looked at Sam. He hesitated, then nodded slightly, and Ellie turned back to me. She said, You know how associations slowly form in a house you've lived in for a long time. The way the sun strikes the ceiling of a certain room may remind you forever of how it felt when you were a child getting dressed for school. Do you know what I mean?
I said, Sure. After a hot day, the beams of my house cool off and contract; make a lot of noise. Every time it happens I remember the first time I tasted strawberries as a kid. With some of the other old associations in my house, the memories are gone, only the emotions left, and I can't remember why they began.
Yes! Ellie leaned forward, excited. This house is full of them! Turn a corner in the front hallway, and the way the stairs rise toward the second floor gives me a feeling of peace. And when the back screen door slams, just the sound of it makes me happy for no reason I know. She hesitated, then said, And there are other more specific things. One morning I walked into the library. Sam was sitting there reading. The windowpanes are divided into quarters, and the sun came through at an angle, and four diamond-shaped patches of sunlight lay across the bindings of the books on the shelves. Harry, I saw them, smiled, and said to Sam, Well, the Pelliers arrive tomorrow for a week. Won't we have fun! And Sam looked up and nodded. He knew it, too! Then we just stared at each other. Because we don't know anyone named Pellier; we never have. And no one was coming next day.
Sam said, I thought she was nuts, too, Harry, till that happened. But from then on, things happened to me, too. There's an upstairs window, and when you open it, it squeals and the sash weight rattles. All I can tell you is that whenever that happens I'm just glad to be alive. And a couple of months ago I opened the front door to see if the morning paper had arrived. My hand touched the doorknob and the instant I felt it — it's porcelain and oval; feels like a china egg — I thought, Today's the parade! At the same time, I knew there wasn't any parade, hadn't been a parade in Darley for years. He turned to Ellie. Tell him about the skating.
She said, Night before last we were reading in the living room. I looked up from my book at the fireplace, then thought, In a couple of months, we'll be lighting that. And when we do, there'll be skating on Sikermann's Slough. Yet I don't even know what that means.
I felt the hair on the back of my neck prickle as I said, I do. It's been filled in and forgotten for years but it was still there when my father was a boy — a slough that used to freeze over every winter. It was on a corner of what was once the Sikermann farm, sometime in the eighteen eighties.
In Darley, as elsewhere, building slacks off during the winter; and whenever I had time, I tried to learn where or when the old house existed before but I never did. The title block of the original plans tells for whom they were drawn but I found nothing about him or the plans in town records which isn't particularly surprising. I poked through back files of the old Darley Intelligencer, too, but found out very little; they're incomplete with gaps of days, weeks, months, and even years. All I learned was how many more fires there were back in the days of largely wood construction and of gas and kerosene lighting and wood stoves.
But I have no doubt that that house existed — sometime in the eighties, I should think. And that it was a happy house — one of the occasional rare and wonderful houses that acquire souls and lives of their own; the kind of house that seems to know you're in it and puts its best foot forward; a house born of the feelings and love of the lost and forgotten people who planned, built, lived in, and gave it life. I think that like many another house of the times this one burned and that maybe my granddad produced the plans for a fire-insurance claim agent, then stuck them on his shelves. I don't know.
But in one way or another its life was cut suddenly short. And then, miraculously, it found itself in being again. Room for room, in every least detail — exactly as it had been in the far-off moment when fire flared along the edge of a curtain, perhaps — the old house existed once more. And it simply resumed its life; the kind of life and times, of course, that it knew.
I've never gone back to it. I suppose I'd be welcome but I don't feel that I belong there any more, not in the life the Cluetts lead now. They leave the grounds only when necessary, Sam driving his buggy. No one goes in; the big gates are kept closed. Sam sold his boatyard this spring — for enough money, I've heard, so that he need never work again. They no longer take a newspaper and whether they read their mail no one knows; they never send any.
But every night the lights are on, the wonderfully warm yellow-orange gas lights, and all last winter they used the fireplaces. This summer people have had glimpses of them. They've been seen playing croquet on the lawn, Ellie in a long white dress. And just this week twin hammocks, the kind with long fringe at the sides, appeared on the shaded veranda. And the two of them lie there reading the lazy afternoons away. I know what they read. The books they'd bought had arrived when I last visited the Cluetts, and along with other fine leather-bound old volumes there were the complete works of Dickens and Sir Walter Scott, just the thing for long summer afternoons far back in the past.
For that's where the Cluetts are, of course. I don't quite believe stories I've heard-that one night last winter it snowed on their property and nowhere else; and that occasionally sun has shone or rain has fallen on their roof but not on the rest of the town, as though the house existed in some other year. Just the same, Ellie and Sam are living far back in the past; that's where they are. For their new house is haunted by its old self. And its ghost has captured the Cluetts — rather easily; I think they were glad to surrender.
McCall's, January 1962, LXXXIX(4):72-73, 112-113
The Man with the Magic Glasses
I'm a big noon-hour prowler. I like to duck out of the office when I haven't a lunch date, grab a fast bite, pick up a Hershey bar or a Snickers or something, and then poke around — into a Second Avenue antique store with a bell that clanks when you open the door, or an unclaimed-parcel auction, a store-front judo school, secondhand bookshop, pinball emporium, pawnshop, fifth-rate hotel lobby — you know what I mean?
You do if you've ever been a noon-hour prowler, but there aren't too many of them, not real ones. The only other one I ever ran into from our office — Simon & Laurentz, an advertising agency on Park near Forty-fourth — was Frieda Piper from the art department. I wandered into a First Avenue hardware store one noon this last May and there she was back in the store fiddling with a lathe. At least I was pretty sure no one else could look quite that shapeless and down-at-the-heels, though it was a little dark in there and her back was to me. But, when she turned at the sound of the door opening and her hair fell over her face, I knew it had to be Frieda.
She wore her hair like someone in an 1895 out-of-focus tin-type, parted somewhere near the middle in a jagged lightning streak, hanging straight down at the sides, and snarled up at the back in a sagging granny-knot. It covered the sides of her face as though she were peeking out through a pair of curtains, and it kept creeping out over her eyes as though she'd ducked back behind them. Walking toward her through the hardware store I was thinking that her dresses were like old ladies' hats; you couldn't imagine where they sold that kind. The one she had on now, like all her others, was no particular color; call it anything and you wouldn't be wrong. It was a sort of reddish, greenish, blackish, brownish, haphazard draping of cloth that looked as though it had accidentally fallen on her from a considerable height; even I could see that the hem on one side was a good three inches lower than the other.
The heels of her shoes — not just the ones she had on now but all her shoes all the time — were
so run down that her ankles bent out as though she were learning to skate, and her stocking seams were so crooked you wouldn't have been surprised if they'd actually turned loops. It was an office joke that she bought her stockings in special unmatched pairs with the runs already in, and she's the only young adult woman I ever saw with one of the side pieces of her glasses broken and held together with adhesive tape. They were the same kind of fancy glasses other girls wear, studded here and there with little shiny stones, but half the stones were missing, and the glasses were so knocked out of shape that they hung cockeyed on her nose, one eye almost squinting out over the top of the frame, the other trying to peer out underneath. She looked like the model for some of her own wilder cartoons.
I said, Hi, Frieda; buying a lathe?
She surprised me. Hi, Ted, she said. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I've got a drill press, a router, a planer, a belt-sander, and a nine-inch table saw; now I need a lathe. I looked puzzled; someone had told me she lived in a little two-room apartment on upper Madison Avenue somewhere. She said, Oh, I haven't much room to use them, but I'm crazy about tools! I'm not too interested in clothes, she said as though she thought I might not have noticed, so I'm filling my hope chest with tools. Some day when I'm married, I can build all our furniture. Maybe even the house.
I was pleased at the thought of a girl with a hope chest full of power tools, and wanted to hear a little more about it, and I brought out a Baby Ruth I'd bought, and offered Frieda some. She said no, she still had half a Love Nest left, and pulled it out of her skirt pocket, and we wandered around the hardware store for a while. She chattered away about her wood-working projects. One of them, a wedding gift for her future husband, was to be an enormous multiple-dwelling birdhouse, a sort of slum-clearance project I gathered, and I figured that the guy who married her would probably appreciate it.
She talked all the way back to the office, looking up at me eagerly through her slanted glasses, shoving the hair back off her face. The upper edge of her glasses bisected her right eye, the lower edge bisected the left; and since one lens made half her eye slightly smaller than normal, while the other lens magnified half of the remaining eye, she seemed to have four separate half-eyes of varying sizes, resembling a Picasso painting, and I got a little dizzy and tripped and nearly fell over a curb.
But I learned that Frieda was a full-fledged noon-hour prowler; she'd been to most of the places I had, and she mentioned several, including a bootleg tattooing parlor in the back of a cut-rate undertaker's place, that I hadn't run across. So I wasn't surprised later that week when I passed a Lexington Avenue dance studio to see Frieda there. It was on the second floor, a corner room with big windows; I'd stopped in one noon and knew they offered you a free trial lesson when you came in. So now as I passed on the opposite side of the street, I glanced up and there was Frieda taking the free lesson, her dress billowing and flapping like loose sails in a typhoon. Her head rested dreamily on the instructor's shoulder, her eyes were closed behind the cockeyed glasses, and she was chewing in time to the music; the hand behind the instructor's back held half a candy bar. He was looking down at her as though he were wondering how he'd ever gotten into this line of work.
The reason I mention Frieda is because of what happened the following week. One noon hour I was clear across town wandering around west of Sixth Avenue in the Forties somewhere, and I came to a narrow little place jammed in between an all-night barbershop and a Turkish bath. It said MAGIC SHOP on the window, and down in a corner in smaller letters, NOVELTIES, JOKES, JEWELRY, SOUVENIRS. I went in, of course; there were glass showcases on three sides, practically filling the place. The proprietor was back of one, leaning on the counter reading the Daily News. He was a thin, tired-looking, bald guy about thirty-five, and he just looked up and nodded, then went back to his paper till I was ready for business.
I looked at the stuff in the showcases; it was about what you'd expect. There was some jewelry in one case — fake gold rings mounted with big zircons, imitation turquoise-and-silver Navaho jewelry, Chinese good-luck rings. On one counter was a metal rack filled with printed comic signs, and a display of practical jokes in the showcase underneath; a plastic ice cube with a fly in it; an ink bottle with a shiny metal puddle of what looked like spilled ink — that kind of stuff. I said, What's new in the magic-trick line? and the guy finished a line of what he was reading, then looked up.
Well, he said, have you seen this? and reached into the showcase and brought out a little brass cylinder with a handle, but I recognized it. It changed a little stack of nickels into dimes, and I told him I'd seen it. Well, there's this, he said, and brought out a trick deck of cards, and demonstrated them, staring boredly out the window as he shuffled. I nodded when he finished, and waited. For a moment he stood thinking, then he shrugged a little, reached into the showcase, and pulled out a cheap gray cardboard box filled with a dozen or so pairs of glasses. These are new; some salesman left them last week. I picked up a pair, and looked at them; it was just a cheap plastic frame with clear-glass lenses, no false nose attached or anything like that, and I looked up at the guy again, and said, What're they for?
He reached wearily into the showcase once more — he'd demonstrated so many little tricks for so many people and made so few sales — and brought out a thin silk handkerchief. He made a fist with his other hand, draped the handkerchief over it, and held it up. Put on the glasses, he said, and I did.
It wasn't a bad trick. As soon as I put on the glasses I could see his fist under the handkerchief very clearly, the handkerchief itself barely visible. Not bad, I said, How's it work?
He shrugged. I don't know. Salesman said a few rays of light get through cloth if it's thin, but not enough to see by. The lenses are ground some way to magnify the rays so you can see the hand underneath.
I nodded, taking the glasses off to examine them. Is that the whole trick?
Yeah. He looked away boredly. There are a couple others you can do with it, too.
I glanced out the window. A truck and several cabs stood motionless, blocked in a traffic jam. A man in a business suit and carrying a briefcase turned to cross the street between two of the cabs. A tall good-looking showgirl type from one of the theaters around here walked along the other side of the street. I put the glasses on again absently, wondering if I wanted them; I felt I ought to buy something. The truck and the cabs sat there, the drivers leaning on their wheels trying to keep calm. The man in the business suit stepped up onto the opposite curb. The showgirl was still walking — the showgirl's dress was gone!
There she was, walking along just as before glancing into store windows, and wearing nothing but high heels, a bra, lace-edged panties, and a purse! Then I saw the dress, ghostlike and almost invisible, swaying as she walked. I snatched off the glasses, and instantly the dress was solid — thin but nontransparent cloth. I jammed the glasses back on before she got out of sight, almost putting my eye out with one of the side pieces, the dress became ghostly, and there she was again, by George, that handsome swaying figure under the nearly vanished dress marvelously visible once more.
I rushed to the doorway, looked toward the corner, and there they all were — all the sweet young office girls, not in their summer dresses but walking delightfully along in shoes, bras, and panties. It was entrancing, and I stood there for several happy and amazing minutes. When I finally turned back into the store again the proprietor was reading the News. Ah, look, I said, hesitating, these are fine, but … I was wondering if you had a stronger pair?
He shook his head. No, but it's funny, that's something I get a lot of calls for, and I'm going to check the salesman next time he comes in. These only work through one or two layers of pretty thin cloth; not much use for anything but tricks, far as I can see. There's a couple of good ones, though. For example, you have someone wrap a coin in a handker—
Yeah, yeah; how much?
Buck and a quarter plus tax, he said, and I bought them, and walked back to the office — st
rolled, actually, and it was wonderful. It was absolutely fascinating, in fact, and it seems to me that if girls understood how delicious they look walking along as I saw them now, they'd dress that way all the time, at least in nice weather. It'd be a lot cooler, terrifically healthy, and would bring a great deal of happiness into a drab prosaic world. It might even bring about world peace; it's worth trying anyway.
I sauntered along observing, and grinning so happily — I couldn't help it — that people began staring at me wonderingly, girls especially. Once, stopped on a corner waiting for the traffic cop to wave us across, I stood beside a very good-looking girl with a haughty face — the kind that shrivels you with a look if you so much as glance at her. She stood there in — I don't know why, but it's true — a bright blue bra and a pair of vivid orange panties; I noticed that she was slightly knock-kneed. I leaned toward her, and murmured very quietly, Orange and blue don't go together. She looked at me puzzledly, then her eyes suddenly widened, and she stared at me with her mouth opening. Then she whirled and began looking frantically around her. The light changed, the cop waving us across, and she headed out into the street toward him, and I ran across to the other curb, glancing at my watch so people would think I'd suddenly remembered I was late somewhere. Then I ducked into a building lobby across the street, snatching off the glasses so I'd be harder to identify, and just as I yanked them off I passed a girl who wasn't even wear — but I didn't stop; I hurried on, and came out of the building a block away just across the street from my office.
Upstairs in the office, Zoe was at the switchboard in the lobby as I came in. She was the best-looking girl in the office, resembling Anita Ekberg, only slimmer — more of a fashion-model type. I whipped out my glasses, put them on, said, Hi, smiling at her as I passed, and — what a disappointment! There under that expensive, smart-looking, narrow-waisted, flounced-out dress sat a girl only ounces this side of malnutrition. It was the kind of figure that women, in their pitiful ignorance, envy; no hips, no nothing, except prominent ribs. You don't eat enough, Zoe, I said.