House of Many Shadows

by Barbara Michaels

  “What comes next?”

  “If I knew, I wouldn’t tell you,” Meg muttered.

  “Wait a minute, I’ll get it… The Traveller banged on the door again; you’d think he’d have caught on by then, wouldn’t you?

  “ ‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,

  That I kept my word,“ he said.

  “But they never did answer. And

  “The silence surged softly backward,

  When the plunging hoofs were gone.

  “Slick, sentimental stuff,” he concluded, and popped the rest of his ham sandwich into his mouth.

  “It may be sentimental and old-fashioned, but it packs a wallop. When that door opened last night and the moonlight slid into the hall, I could almost see Them, waiting on the stair. Oh, it was sheer imagination—illusion—not one of my hallucinations, if I may still be allowed to call them that. But it was shivery, all the same.”

  “I know. It’s the vagueness of the poem that gets to you. Who was the Traveller? Who sent him? Why didn’t anyone answer?”

  “They were dead,” Meg said. “All dead, long before he came. He came too late.”

  “That’s stupid?” Andy said angrily. “As a literary critic you make a good furniture mover.”

  “There you go again, losing your temper over nothing.”

  “I am not losing my temper! I am perfectly calm. I—” Andy stopped speaking. His mouth hung open. His eyes were focused on some invisible object in the near distance. Meg was about to remonstrate when he brought his fist down on the table with an impact that rattled the dishes.

  “Stupid!” he exclaimed. “My God, are we stupid!”

  “Thanks for including yourself,” Meg snapped. “What are you mad about now?”

  “Our stupidity. Here we are looking for ghosts among my ancestors, when it is perfectly obvious that we didn’t see this house, or anyone who ever lived in it. The old man with the white beard brought his ambience with him. Another room. A room with different walls, a lower ceiling… Meg, there must have been a house on this site before this one. That’s the house we saw. That house, and one of the people who lived in it. None of my relatives.”

  This new idea made him look years younger, brought color to his cheeks and a genuine smile to his eyes. He really believes it, Meg thought incredulously; he was honestly afraid… of what? Of seeing his dead mother sharing the ghostly vigil of her grim old grandfather?

  Meg was touched; sympathy made her reply less emphatic than it might otherwise have been.

  “I hate to discourage you, Andy, but aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”

  “That’s how scientific discoveries are made—by researchers jumping to conclusions and then checking them out. The difference between a scientist and a fanatic is that the scientist discards his theory if the evidence doesn’t confirm it. The fanatic twists the evidence to fit the theory.”

  “What kind of evidence do you think you can find?”

  “First, I’ll try to learn whether there was another house here. There probably was. This one is only a hundred-odd years old, and the area was settled in the late seventeenth century. I’ve got some books on early Pennsylvania history, and there may be more in the library.”

  Andy’s eyes were shining with enthusiasm. He ran his fingers through his mop of reddish hair, disturbing a collection of colored scraps that floated down onto the table.

  “Wallpaper,” he explained, brushing at them. “It’s a messy job, getting that stuff off.”

  “But it’s a job that has to be finished, now you’ve begun. I’ve got a job to do too; I hope you don’t expect me to help you hunt for your ghosts.”

  “Stop talking about my ghosts. If they belong to anybody, they belong to you. You brought ‘em here.”

  “Of all the rotten things to say!” Meg jumped to her feet. “You’re contradicting your own dumb theory. If there are ghosts, they’ve been here all along. If they belong to me, they aren’t ghosts; they’re scars on the brain.”

  “What are you getting so excited about?”

  “Oh, you’re impossible. I’m going back to work. You can scrape wallpaper or invent ghosts or do whatever you like. Good-bye!”

  Andy followed her out, leaving the dirty dishes on the table.

  “Come along and see what I’ve done,” he said placatingly. “Don’t worry, I’ll finish the job; Sylvia’s paying me, and I’ll give her eight honest hours of my precious time before I start ghost hunting.”

  Meg shrugged, and let him lead the way to the master bedroom. She stopped on the threshold with an exclamation of dismay. To call this a messy job was the understatement of the year. Andy had finished one wall. The floor was covered with scraps, some damp and sticky, some dry and flaky. The fragments were a rainbow confetti of colors—red, white, green, gold, flowery blue. He had moved the big bed into the middle of the room and covered it with newspapers; there were scraps of paper even on that protective surface.

  “Three layers,” Andy explained. “The lowest was that green stuff with gold patterns. Too bad I couldn’t save it, but the layer above was practically fused with it. At least this is honest-to-God plaster, not plasterboard, which softens and peels when it’s wet.”

  “Fascinating,” Meg said drily; but she felt a ridiculous urge to pick up the nearest tool and start scraping. She suppressed her instinct and turned to the door.

  When she got upstairs she realized she had forgotten to ask Andy about the labels. Standing on the threshold of the vast chamber, Meg felt her spirits sink. The room was so big and so full… The inventory was impossible without labels; the furniture was too heavy to move; even the books had been a disappointment. She decided to abandon this room for a while and tackle one of the smaller chambers.

  At the risk of life and limb and antiques, Meg began dragging things out into the corridor. Sylvia hadn’t been kidding when she mentioned Chippendale; Meg found two chairs that had that maker’s distinctive hallmarks, and she thought she saw others farther back in the room. The attic-windows were darkening with a rainy twilight when she caught sight of the door in the wall.

  She was kneeling on top of a massive dining room table from whose surface she had removed four chairs, two end tables, and the pieces of a broken bookcase. She had taken her shoes off, although the precaution was probably useless; the top of the once shining mahogany was badly scratched, as were most of the other wooden surfaces in the room.

  Meg sat back, crossed her legs, and contemplated the door. It was only a rough square cut into the unfinished wall of the room and furnished with hinges and a catch. It probably opened into a space under the eaves of the roof, and the possibility of anything valuable being stored there was remote indeed. Yet, Meg argued with herself, why should the door have been cut unless there was something beyond it? Something old.

  She knew then that her decision to abandon the inventory had been motivated by something more positive than frustration. She had been guided, all afternoon, by an unconscious urge that had only now come to the surface of her mind.

  Andy’s ghost theory had gotten to her. He had played brilliantly on her situation and her state of mind; she admitted to herself, although she would never have admitted it to him, that she would almost prefer ghosts to mental illness. The idea had its own macabre fascination. Who can resist a ghost story? And in her cynical theorizing about Andy’s possible guilt she had forgotten one thing: there was no way she could think of in which he could have produced a description of the visionary room that agreed so devastatingly with her account.

  If the room they had both seen was in an earlier house, now destroyed—and Andy’s comments on that subject made sense—that house must have existed in the early nineteenth, or even the eighteenth, century. Was that what she was searching for—relics, mementos, of the house that had once stood on the site of Trail’s End?

  Meg frowned. Hunches are supposed to be the result of the subconscious reasoning; but in this case her subconscious was reasoning li
ke a three-year-old. Even if there had been an earlier house, there was nothing to suggest that any of its furnishings had been moved to the newly built mansion, or that the same family had owned both houses. Certainly there was no reason to suppose that the surviving relics, if any, would be concealed behind that particular door.

  Brushing the hair from her face with a very dirty hand, Meg crawled forward.

  A wilderness of table legs and bedposts still lay between her and her goal. She moved only those objects over which she could not crawl or through which she could not squeeze, and before long she had lowered herself into the tiny space before the door. If it opened outward, she was out of luck. There was barely room for her own slim body, and a slate-topped chiffonier stood squarely in front of the door. But if it opened inward…

  It did not. The catch moved readily enough. The door opened, with a squeak of rusty hinges, and then caught against the chiffonier, leaving a dark opening barely large enough for Meg’s arm.

  By dint of movement which would have strained a contortionist, Meg got herself around the chiffonier and squatted down, with a slate corner denting her arm and a brass bedpost poking a hole in her back. She put her face up to the opening and peered in. The darkness was absolute; there was no window in the area under the eaves, and the solid old house had no cracks in its structure.

  The dark, long-enclosed space smelled musty and strange, but there was no stench of decay. There would be cobwebs, of course, but no rats; she would have heard them by now, scuttling away from intrusion. Meg gritted her teeth, and delicately inserted her hand.

  She felt dust—not ordinary dust, but the accumulation of decades, soft and thick as old velvet. Under the dust was a hard surface.

  The odd compulsion that had brought her this far was very strong now, strong enough to overcome her fear of touching something nasty. Meg’s fingers groped exploringly, and then closed around the curved sides of what seemed to be an oval box, about a foot long and six inches high. She forgot about mice, rats, dusts, and cobwebs. She knew she had to have that box.

  The opening was too narrow. Meg let go of the box and stood up. Bracing her feet, she shoved at the chiffonier. Perspiration streaked her face and the muscles in her back protested, but inch by inch she edged the chiffonier away, careless of what damage it might be inflicting on the furniture behind it. Then she squatted down and tried again. Big enough—just barely. Without waiting to examine her prize, Meg crawled back through the maze of furniture and settled herself on the top of the dining room table from which she had started out on her bizarre quest. Her intelligent fingers had recognized the object even before she saw it; there was no mistaking the precise, meticulous handwork of early American craftsmanship. This box was no factory product. The neatly matched tenons, where the ends of the curved wood met, reminded her of Shaker work. Unlike the simple Shaker boxes, this seemed to be painted. She could see dim shadows of color under the muffling dust.

  Using the tail of her shirt, which was already filthy, Meg wiped the dust from the top of the box. The pattern emerged, like a garden from which fog is driven by the wind—stiff bright tulip shapes, scarlet and blue, with green leaves; red hearts, sulfurous-yellow birds with green and blue feathers.

  Meg thanked whatever gods may be for that morning in the antique shops of Wasserburg. She knew the designs— hearts, parrots, and tulips were typical Pennsylvania Dutch decoration. The authenticity of the piece was beyond question. Not only did the pattern have a primitive vigor and force that was impossible to imitate, but the box had lain in darkness for more years than Meg could imagine. Reproductions of Pennsylvania Dutch work had not become popular until recently. Was this what she had been seeking all afternoon? It was old enough—eighteenth century, almost certainly.

  The top fitted so snugly that Meg broke a fingernail prying at it. When it came off she saw a crumpled layer of what appeared to be heavy paper—a protective wrapping, for it bore no trace of writing, and Meg could feel something beneath it.

  The windows were squares of deep gray, now, and the single bulb hanging from the ceiling gave poor light. Meg tore at the paper, knowing that she was breaking all the rules of the antique trade. The object under the paper had | the softness of cloth. Sudden exposure to air and rough handling could damage fabric. But urgency made Meg ruthless; she dragged the thing out, spreading it across her knees and smoothing out the creases of centuries.

  Centuries… more than two of them. The first thing she saw was a date, not printed or drawn in pen and ink, but rendered in exquisitely minute cross-stitch. A row of neat little trees hung with rosy fruit; a white house, done in the same precise stitching. Animals. A black-and-white cat, a fuzzy white dog with a blue bow in its topknot. A pony, stiff and angular, with legs no healthy equine ever possessed.

  The colors were faded into pastel beauty—rose, pale blue, soft green, cream, buff. The design had the stiff -harm of a primitive painting. But it was not a painting. It was a sampler—the same sampler she had seen in her vision of the shadowy room, hanging on an unreal wall in a house that no longer existed.

  Chapter 5

  The implications of what she had found whirled around in Meg’s brain, unsorted and incompletely realized; but one thing was clear. Under no circumstances could she have seen this sampler before it appeared in the vision. It had been packed away behind a wall of stored furniture for at least a hundred years. The violence with which she attempted to reject this unpalatable fact told her she was still a long way from accepting Andy’s ghosts. But it was hard to find a rational explanation for this. Andy’s voice made her jump.

  “Have you taken up mysticism? You look like a flower child—stringy hair, dirty jeans, torn shirt—squatting cross-legged on a tabletop. I’ll bet you can’t get out of that position without breaking a leg.”

  Meg turned her head. Her neck felt rusty; she expected to hear it creak like an antique spring.

  In spite of Andy’s sarcastic comments he seemed to like what he saw; he was smiling, and as her dust-smeared face came into view the smile broadened into a laugh.

  “Talk about dedication to duty! Come out of there, Meg, and let me restore you with flagons. Or is it apples? I’d come after you, but I don’t trust my weight on those priceless antiques. How the hell did you get there? And why?”

  Meg looked at the sampler, still spread across her lap. Her body shielded it from Andy’s sight; the light was too dim for him to see clearly. Suddenly she knew she didn’t want him to see the sampler. It was too much for her to take in all at once, she had to have time to consider the possibilities—time to invent an explanation that would quiet her reeling senses—before she exposed the sampler to Andy’s too-susceptible mind. With the same rough disregard with which she had ripped the sampler from its box, she folded it and thrust it down the front of her shirt, jamming the tails of that garment into her jeans in order to hold her prize in place.

  “What’s the matter, are you too stiff to move?” Andy’s voice had a note of suspicion. “What have you got there?”

  “A box,” Meg said. Her coolness surprised her; it was as if a battery of unsuspected defenses were snapping automatically into place. “Look, Andy; I think it’s a bride box. They put these things in museums.”

  She crawled across the table, carrying the box under one arm. When she reached the top of the sideboard, near the door, Andy caught her by the wrist and swung her lightly down. Still holding her, he smiled down into her upturned face.

  “Dirt becomes you,” he said softly. “You look about fifteen, Meg. Or are you too young to be flattered by that?”

  His hazel eyes were flecked with gold that danced dangerously. For a moment Meg forgot her worry an confusion; she even forgot the sampler, hidden in her shirt Her lips parted. Andy’s hands tightened, pulling her close to him.

  The box, which she was clutching to her bosom, la between them as effectively as a chastity belt. Andy‘ expression altered as the hard surface pressed into hi chest.

&n
bsp; “Hey. That’s old, Meg. How old?”

  “Eighteenth century, probably.”

  Andy released her and Meg wondered, disgustedly, how she could have forgotten herself even for a second. She didn’t even like Andy much. The brief interlude had settle one question, though; Andy’s reactions were one hundred percent heterosexual, even if he was easily distracted.

  “Lord, I’m tired,” she said, and yawned widely.

  “And dirty.”

  “You’ve mentioned that several times,” Meg snapped “If you’ll get out of the way, I’ll take my offensive body to the bathtub.”

  A spark shone in Andy’s brown eyes, and was quickly quenched. “Make it fast, and I’ll have a drink ready,” hi offered, stepping back. “I’ll take the box—”

  “I’ll take the box. I found it.”

  “Oh, all right. But no fair looking till we’re together.”