Maynard’s House

by Herman Raucher

  He bumped into it—his cistern barrel; and he stopped to contemplate it, at first reasoning that it was a wall and that he could go no farther, until he heard the sound—water, trickling. Through the barrel and on, coursing its natural way to somewhere else. To where?

  He groped and found it, the stream, rushing. It had a destination. He did not. He’d follow it, his ankle hurting so piercingly that he allowed it to drag through the cold water as he crawled. It did little to lessen the pain.

  He felt all coming apart. His mind was fine, functioning clearly, telling him where he was and what he was doing and why. But his body was failing him, his right leg already so useless that he’d have done better without it. His hands were burned close to skinless, the result of his having held hot rifle barrels too hard for too long. They were also cut and bleeding for a variety of other reasons—from having grappled with his shattered windows, from having dragged himself over the sharp rock ledge of his cellar, from having gotten his left hand jammed in the trapdoor when he failed to lift it all the way the first time he tried—and two of his fingers, he suspected, were broken.

  His eyes were caused to tear by whatever gas the trailing green light was bringing with it. His lungs were straining, for there was less and less oxygen, and he breathed in all that was still available to him, like a kid sucking soda through a bent straw.

  His heart was thumping and his head was ringing, and his knees hurt from his crawling, and his ribs felt pulled fleshless, and his stomach lurched, and the cold sweat ran, and the green light pursued, and he knew that he had to have gone well past the perimeters of his house perhaps by a quarter of a mile, though there was nothing he could do about it. He had to keep moving on because there was no turning back.

  The stream would have to lead to somewhere, but its overhead clearance was shrinking with every yard he crawled, so that even if he were physically capable of standing he’d not have been able to do so to his full height. It was a narrowing, lowering funnel that he was passing through, and when the jagged rock ceiling was but inches above the stream he was forced to follow its descending contour and go with it into the water.

  It was icy but not deep. He could walk through it and still keep his nose above it, but not by much—and still the green fog followed, barely an inch of air between its base and the stream’s surface. But what deviled him more than anything, more than the grinding pain and the stalking terror, was the realization that he had no choice in the matter, that he was doing what he was doing because somewhere it had been determined that he would do it. Nor was it a case of right or wrong. It was do or die. Though, in the frightening final analysis, it might well be a case of do and die, for nowhere was it written that by doing it he wouldn’t die.

  The green light still trailed him, floating above him, dragging its noxious fumes like a rotting carcass, plugging his nostrils if he tarried, plunging down his throat when he idled to check his footing.

  Though the stream still gurgled, he was aware that it had slowed, no longer urging him on insistently—rather, seductively coaxing him along; small eddies of it bubbling about his face as though the stream had run out of ancillaries and was unsure about where to flow next.

  And then, as if the stopper had been pulled, it all trickled out, all the water, slowly disappearing under what appeared to be some kind of wall directly before him, wedged between two huge flanking rocks. And the stream drained off him, shimmying down from his neck to his boots, as if he were stepping out of a slithery chemise.

  The green light hung back, blocking his return if that was his intention, sitting on the water like a huge hen. And so he had to turn his full attention to what was ahead of him—the wooden wall. He had no other option.

  He examined it, balancing on one leg because the pain was still intense despite its immersion in the Novocaining cold water. It looked to be a door. It had the dimensions of a door, rectangular, higher than it was wide. He reached out to touch it and was immediately revulsed, his hand recoiling involuntarily from the moss-swathed green fungus that ran with slime and oozed with pustules that burst at his touch, releasing a smell of such decay that he came close to collapsing at the reek of it.

  And something came with the choking odor—from beyond the door, which, in touching, he had apparently pushed open just enough for it to wander out. A sound. Voices. Throaty and whispery. Where had he heard it before?

  He was, by then, almost fearless—various horrors having afflicted him so constantly and without killing him that the newer ones were bouncing off him with a reduced effectiveness. Instead of being frightened, he was curious, wondering what would come next. It was like wandering through a fun house. Nothing could scare you as long as you knew that you couldn’t be hurt, and that it would all end soon enough, and that you would one day look back on it and laugh.

  Bravely or stupidly, but certainly curiously, he pushed at the door again, with both hands—and both hands disappeared half a foot into the dripping moss of it, causing odors worse than before to explode at him, smells so foul as to be uncataloguable, for there was nothing that they could be compared with. But he hung on and continued to push, up to his elbows in the rancid muck before the door showed any sign of giving.

  But give it did, and slowly it swung open on silent and unseen hinges, like some form of huge plant life able to think and plot, allowing an interloper easy entrance so that it might devour him just as easily.

  All within the place turned to him, twenty of them, thirty, their voices a garbled babble, yet so arranged and rendered as to not be cacophonous; Austin hearing it all as a chant, Gregorian and judgmental and chillingly condemning, though none of the words registered beyond an occasional “thee” and an interspersed “thou.”

  They were draped in gray hues, these specters, with touches of pitch and dapples of white, dull flashes of light playing accents on their metal buckles, soft highlights of death wiggling blandly in their pupilless eyes, their tall hats and loose capes corrupting whatever true shapes they once might have possessed.

  The air they stood in was equally muted, dull grays and flat blues silking in and out in movable planes, like microscope slides, coursing over one another to keep the colors murkily diffused. All of it slow, slow—no hurry in there where everything was, at minimum count, three hundred years dead.

  Then the green mist that had herded him all that distance flew in from behind him, rushing up and overtaking him as if pulled in by the suddenly opened door. And it camped on his shoulders, endowing him with a cape of his own, as if it were a sacrificial mantle and he the chosen victim. At which point the murmur grew, a chord of angry satisfaction adding to the mix—and Austin knew where he had seen and heard them, and could guess at why Maynard had been so disturbed by his unwillingness to leave the house.

  Two of them came to him, each taking an arm, the cold going through him like a spear, and he could hear his heart stop. He wasn’t dead but knew he would be, the time, place and circumstances of that cut-in-stone fact about to be decided by the ungodly assemblage.

  They walked him to the center of the place, where, almost directly above his head, hung a jangle of flapping roots that at first look appeared as whipping steel cables. Instinctively he jumped back from it, his captors giving him that leeway, though they held him fast at the spot to where he had retreated.

  He looked up at it again and saw it for what it was: the dangling roots of a tree. It was as if he were in the earth, standing below it, loathsome abomination that it was—his witch’s tree.

  He had come that far from his house in following the random stream and was now standing beneath it as it slowly began to descend, like a sluggish elevator. And he could feel the consummate evil of it, crowding out all sanity—even his captors falling back from it, to allow it room, for its roots were as spastic ropes that could eat, and, thrashing about for sustenance as they were, anything might serve as fare.

  The tree continued its descent, its roots reaching for and ultimately fixing on the
smoky floor of the place, taking horrible hold there like a huge fist of many fingers, drawing in whatever juices it found there while making an inhaling noise like the death rattle of a beast.

  And as it sunk its roots deeper it pulled itself farther down, and its trunk appeared before Austin, scaled and blotched and wretchedly petrified. And, unable to retain what its roots had leeched onto, it bled a dreadful sap that rivuleted down its bark to spill back into the place it had been sucked from.

  Austin looked up to see the tree’s mangled branches, rotted into a nightmarish crosshatch that no mad sketcher could have rendered. And there, on one of the limbs, her scrawny neck stretched like a chicken’s, on a length of taut hemp—hung the witch, dangling and twitching, spitting urine and drooling feces, laughing hoarsely at her own never-ending agony.

  Her face was as creased and as scaled as the bark of the tree she twisted on. Her black eyes sightless; her nose but a gnawed bone with parched skin stretched across it; her mouth screamingly open in perpetual rigor mortis; her few teeth, grown long in death, were as the teeth of a rake, inches apart and a half a foot long, curved down into inverted tusks that probed at her chest. And her toenails and fingernails were like the frozen flight paths of gnats, extending and curling every which way, some even returning to penetrate her body.

  Hatless, her white matted hair hung down in tormented strands, more of it seeming to spring from the pits and valleys of her cadaverous face, and from her nose and her ears. Insects were visible in it, worms and slugs, touring their way in and out of her hornet’s-nest skull which was of the consistency of papier-mâché.

  And from every pore a yellow fluid oozed, even from her eyes, caking wherever it chose to on her shred of a black smock, the attendant odor causing Austin to wither and sag and drop to his knees before the eternally dying gorgon.

  Death-dancing and swaying, slobbering and regurgitating, the grotesquerie raised one hand at him—a condor hand, plated and hooked, its spiraling nails straightening and pressing together so as to form a scimitar. Long, sharp and wicked, the thus fashioned blade was ready to decapitate—and Austin, like a dumb animal, stood there, awaiting his own beheading.

  The two specters holding him stepped sideways so as to allow the witch proper room in which to perform the scheduled execution—but she did no such thing, choosing instead to make of her fist a hand again, her nails curving under and retracting to accommodate the act. And, holding it to Austin’s face, she counted silently with it, unfolding three fingers one at a time, each finger whipping a nail close enough to his forehead to inflict there three separate cuts, none of which he ever felt though he bled profusely, a ribbon of blood flowing down into each eye, the third blood ribbon coursing over his nose and into his mouth.

  One—two—three!

  23

  Clump—clump—clump!

  The footsteps were heavy on the floor above his head, but they penetrated enough to bridge the gap and bring him back, though not all at once, and not with the clarity of thinking necessary to complete the journey.

  He was exhausted, squeezed dry of all energy, his brain close to absent. Still, some thoughts began to diligently filter in.

  In was dark. Cellar dark. He was in his root cellar. The fire was out, the green mist gone, the trapdoor in place. He reached down to touch his ankle. It didn’t hurt. There was nothing wrong with it beyond an inconsequential twist. He was not wet. Wet with perspiration, yes, but not stream wet, not wading-in-the-water wet. He touched his forehead. No cuts, no bleeding. He was intact.

  Again the footsteps above his head. Clump, clump, clump. Three times. The witch’s count. He inhaled, half expecting her acrid breath to again offend his senses. It didn’t. It wasn’t there. Only the damp smell of his cellar, ringing with the fragrance of wet earth, hung with the clean, clear promise of life.

  He found matches in his pocket and struck one, bestowing a light upon the darkness that was immediately picked up by the running stream. It illuminated the entire cellar, and he could see where the little stream ran lazily beyond the cistern before trickling away into the dark, ducking under and between mossy rock walls that invited speculation but not passage. The match spent, it went out, burning his fingers, but that was good. It meant that feeling was straggling back into formation as well as thought.

  All manner of frightening recollections vanished with the light of that one match. He was alive and well. He had survived the house’s most powerful trick. It also had to have been its last trick, for it could never top it, nor would it be likely to try. The nightmare was over. The spell broken. He had won.

  “Anyone down there?” Somebody was standing on the trapdoor directly above his head. “Hey—time to be goin’.”

  He was not yet ready to deal with whoever it was up there. Other things had to be wrestled with first. Other images had to be set straight, evaluations made, reality and fantasy separated and kept apart, before he could go up into the charred remnants of his house.

  He remembered shooting it up, causing the fire and dropping into the cellar. He remembered, too, reaching up and putting the trapdoor back into place. Still, much of what had happened continued to dodge dissection. Why had he done it? What forces had driven him to it? Fear? Isolation? Susceptibility? Where did Ara enter into it? And had he struck his head somewhere along the way like in so many old movies? And if so, was all that business with the witch and the tree and the specters a result of that injury? Concussion. Concussion could do that. Concussion, even a mild one, could cause a man to lose his memory and his rationality. It could cause and sustain such a condition for a split second, for minutes, for hours or for days. How long had been his trauma? How deep his jumble? And was he, at the root of it, dealing with a journey that, though clearly remembered, had never been embarked upon?

  He heard the heavy wooden square being dislodged from its position. He heard the scraping of it and the clang of it, the iron ring of it slapping back into place as whatever hand held it released it. He looked up, his eyes taking some moments to focus, and he saw, standing there in a halo of diffused and dusty light, his huge hands spread over his knees as he squinted down into the cellar—Jack Meeker.

  “What’re ya doin’ down there? Ya goin’ to miss ya train if ya don’t get movin’.”

  He didn’t move. He tried to get a fix on it. Jack Meeker. Dead Jack Meeker standing up and talking down at him. Or was it just a trick of sight and sound? With the light behind him as it was, the man could be anyone. And the voice, nasal and drifting, could be the voice of any state-o’-Mainer. He looked up again, into the light, shielding his eyes with a salute, cocking his ear, the better to hear that voice again.

  “Come on, Maynard. Stop sportin’ with me and come on up outa there.”

  He had called him Maynard. It was definitely Jack Meeker up there, and Jack had definitely called him Maynard. His stomach quickly bore the brunt of both of those lunacies, a straight-line pain shooting up his middle from his rectum to his navel, the tip of it probing further, out to get his heart.

  “Maynard, time and tide ain’t goin’ to wait.” And the big man moved away from the trapdoor, a sharp light sliding in to fill his place.

  Uncertain and shaken, he suspended all judgment, at least for the moment, though the suspicion was fast taking hold that the house was not yet through with him. He pulled himself up and out of the cellar, and, with his legs still dangling, and with only his torso in the room, he balanced on his forearms and looked around, like a groundhog for its shadow—and almost let go at what he saw.

  The house was whole and cheery, the room untouched, sunlight streaming in from its morning windows. The fire? What fire? There was no sign of it ever having occurred. The shattered windows? Hardly. They were all in place, frost-covered and merry. The Boston rocker? Right where it had always sat. The books, the stores, the fine pine plank, all as they were supposed to be. As were his guns, all hanging on their respective pegs with nothing to indicate that they had recently done battl
e. Everything was neat and tidy and parked right smack in the middle of a fine winter morning. And Jack Meeker was at the stove, feeding it a log, prodding the fire with a poker, and he was as big and as real and as motherly-concerned as he had always been.

  “Got to respect fire. Else it can jump up and grab ya.” He turned and smiled, the crinkly eyes positive proof that all was well in Maine. “One hour to make that train. This the bag ya takin’?” He picked up a small overnight bag that lay on a table. It was vinyl and new and had a name inked onto its plastic-covered card marker: “Maynard Whittier.”

  He pulled himself the rest of the way into the room, feeling the floor beneath his boots firm and real. It was all real. It was all happening. Either that or he had gone mad—which might well be the case, since he’d been flirting with that prospect almost from the day he arrived.

  “Hope ya got a couple sandwiches in here, Maynard. Have no idea how long it’ll take ya to get to Fort Devens.” Jack zipped open the bag and examined its contents. “A-yuh. Two sandwiches. And an apple. And what’s this? Cookies. Even a couple napkins. Ya did good, Maynard. Good thinkin’.”

  His head ringing, he walked over to the pine plank that was still there, still nailed to the wall, all the names and comments carved into it still legible. He knelt to look at the last legend on the plank, and, running his fingers over it, he could feel that it had been freshly carved, the wood light and splintery as compared with all the other words, which were dark and smooth with age. There were even wood chips on the floor, fresh shavings of pine. And a small knife next to it. And the implication was all too clear. The words were newly carved.