House of Windows

by John Langan

  Fortunately for me, the sign at the near end of the front walk was hung with a NO VACANCY sign. I pointed this out to Roger, whose face fell, only to pick up almost immediately as he said, "If you'd like to stay someplace else—"

  "I wouldn't," I said. "I'd like to go home—to Wellfleet."

  There were maybe two seconds during which I watched Roger debate with himself. Was it worth insisting that we stay here? I was ready to go home without him if it came to that. I had my own car keys, and I was the one with the keys to the Cape House. Let him stay on the island as long as he liked. At the end of the two seconds, he grinned apologetically and said, "Of course."

  As the ferry was pulling away from the Vineyard, Roger gazed at the island—or the spot where the island was; the fog lay as heavy as before—and murmured too quietly for me to hear. We were back in the galley, a cup of tea in front of me, a can of Coke in front of him.

  "What?" I asked.

  "Just thinking," he said, "remembering a few lines from Tennyson."

  "Oh?" I hate Tennyson. Talk about a gorgeous poet with no mind.

  "Yes, the end of 'Ulysses.' I assume you've read it."

  "I'm familiar with it."

  "At the very end, when the aged Ulysses is trying to rally his followers for one final sail into the unknown, he holds out hope of what they might encounter on their voyage. He says,

  "'It may be the gulfs will wash us down;

  "'It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,

  "'And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.'"

  Roger shrugged. "That's all."

  That wasn't all. It was a code, and it wasn't very hard to break. Roger was afraid we'd just set sail from the Happy Isle, that we were leaving great Achilles wandering the mist. He was asking for reassurance, for me to reach across the table, grasp his hand, and tell him that it was all right. Instead, I said, "I can't understand how you can stand Tennyson. My God. Talk about sound and fury, signifying nothing."

  Whatever Roger's other concerns, he was not about to let such a blatant attack on one of his favorite poets go unanswered. I had counted on this. I wanted an argument. We occupied ourselves with a fairly heated one for the remainder of the boat ride, Roger summoning examples of Tennyson's depth and brilliance, me countering that they were shallow and contrived. What a relief, to have an outlet for the hostility churning inside me. I didn't really want to argue with him about Tennyson—so he liked a lousy poet, so what?—I wanted to argue about what he'd done in that holding cell. Only, I didn't want to argue with him about that. What I mean is, however mad at him I was, however much pleasure it would have provided to scream at him in the short term, in the long term, I needed to talk to Roger about what he'd done, which I wouldn't be able to if we fought about it now. So instead, we debated the merits and defects of a second-rate poet.

  The argument was pretty much over by the time we were driving up 6 to Wellfleet. Roger had lapsed into silent outrage, which was fine by me. My anger temporarily appeased, I had a mostly quiet ride to turn over what had happened on the Vineyard. I thought about the shape I'd glimpsed in the carousel mirror. Ted, yes—he'd been the cause of whatever I'd been through on the carousel, that—disorientation. Why, though? For that matter, why had he shown himself to me at the diner? (Not that I was thinking about what I'd seen, no.) To scare me? Mission accomplished, in spades. Certainly, the day's events might mean nothing more than their effects on me; although they seemed a bit elaborate if fright were Ted's only goal. What about the thing in Roger's cell? The thing whose voice had seemed to come from someplace deep within him, and which was so reminiscent of the house, the thing that had offered to fulfill his curse in exchange for, what had it said? "Blood and pain."

  We were almost at the Orleans traffic circle. I told Roger to turn off into Orleans. "What for?" he asked.

  "I want to stop at the liquor store."

  He grunted, and steered to the right.

  At the liquor store, I bought a bottle of red wine, two bottles of single-malt Scotch, and a bottle of soda water. Scotch was Roger's drink, not mine: too medicine-y. If I planned to talk to him, I was going to need to loosen his tongue, and I figured a couple of Scotch-and-sodas, on top of the wine we'd drink with dinner, would help him along.

  For the remainder of the drive to Wellfleet, the thing in the corner occupied me. The moment I'd seen it in my—what was I going to call that experience? A vision? A vision of the most intense kind. The instant I'd noticed it among the shadows, my nerves had jolted. Did this mean the thing was the house? Or was it like the house—or the house like it? It seemed too much of a stretch for it not to be connected to the house, so—was it the source of the weirdness we'd been through? Where had it come from? I had a momentary image of a group of the college students who'd rented the house in the sixties playing with a Ouija board, opening a door that should have been kept closed, throwing a switch that shouldn't have been thrown.

  No. There was Thomas Belvedere and his "Dark Feast" paintings, which I was more certain than ever recorded the strangeness he'd undergone during his summer in the house. Viola Belvedere's letter hinted as much. Whatever was wrong with the house reached back at least to him, and possibly beyond—which, when you came right down to it, wasn't anything I didn't already know. When you're facing these kinds of problems, though, any sense you can find in them feels like a victory.

  The house had been—haunted? Off? Let's say off. The house had been off for at least a half century. Not everyone who lived there had experienced anything. Dr. Sullivan and her family hadn't reported a single out of the usual occurrence. For that matter, neither had Roger, Joanne, and Ted for the decades they'd lived there. Did that mean the house was intermittently off? That it was following some kind of occult schedule, a giant alarm clock, set to ring every fifty years—which begged the question, who'd set it?

  The turnoff for the Cape House was ahead. Roger took the driveway faster than usual—his way of showing he was still annoyed—slaloming up and around it, gravel pinging off the car. When I didn't respond, he must have taken it as my way of saying I could play this game, too, but honestly, I was thinking about the house. As he brought the car to a stop, I turned to him and said, "There are steaks in the fridge. Do you feel like grilling them?"

  "I suppose I could," Roger said, doing his best to feign disinterest. He couldn't fool me, though. I saw the secret thrill that ran through him at the mention of the word "grill." If there's one gender stereotype I abide by, it's this: allow a man to apply fire to raw meat, and he'll be happy as a clam. It must make guys feel like great strong hunters, roasting the mastodon steaks over the campfire. Talk about atavism.

  While Roger poured fresh charcoal onto the grill and soaked it in lighter fluid—it didn't matter that the charcoal was the pre-soaked kind; Roger wasn't satisfied unless there was a distinct chance of him burning his eyebrows off—while he started the grill and prepared the steaks, rubbing them with a combination of cracked pepper, dry mustard, and crushed garlic, I set the table and threw together a salad. The salad done, I opened the bottle of red wine and poured a sizable glass of it for Roger, a more modest portion for myself. I wanted a bigger glass—I would have been happy to skip the meal and go directly to the alcohol—but I needed my head reasonably clear. I passed Roger's wine to him when he came back inside in search of the fork and tongs. He took it outside, where he rested it on the backyard table beside the plate with the steaks while he waited for the towering inferno to subside and the coals to heat.

  I brought my glass through to the living room, where I stood looking out the front windows at the cemetery. The wine was strong, sharp, and it snapped your tongue as it went down. What you'd call an acquired taste, I guess, although I appreciated its roughness. You had a house that was malignant—or that had a malignancy. Could houses get sick? Not literally—I'm talking more metaphorically—metaphysically, even. Could a house turn against itself? Or could it attract the notice of some kind of—disease? Tumor? The thi
ng in the corner had asked for blood and pain. How much pain had the house seen while Roger and Joanne—and Ted—had lived there? Nothing out of the ordinary, at first. Roger and Joanne's marriage had known the normal peaks and valleys, as had their relationship with Ted. But then things had started to sour. Joanne had her affair with the anthropology professor. Ted submerged into teenage angst and rebellion. Roger grew isolated from the two of them. All the relationships under that roof had decayed. None of it unusual—lots of families endure much worse—except that here, in Belvedere House, it had fed something, what might have been the house itself, or might have been hanging around the house like a dog lurking under the table, hoping for scraps.

  I drank more of the wine—gulped it—and my eyes stung. I walked back into the kitchen, where I could watch Roger, glass in one hand, turning the steaks over on the grill. He splashed some of his wine over the meat; fire jumped to taste it. Why would this thing reveal itself to Roger? Because he had stumbled onto something that promised it a meal to make what it had been dining on so far seem like—it would be like going from eating dog-food to a seven-course meal at the Canal House. Yes, I mean the curse. Roger had—he'd signed Ted over to the thing. I didn't know if he'd known that's what he was doing—however much he wanted revenge on Ted, I wasn't sure it went all this way, to wanting to consign him to a pocket hell. Did this mean the thing had my child, as well? How could I know? I had no doubt the miscarriage had been part of the price Roger had paid for cursing Ted, but without the malediction being extended to cover that child, could the thing take it, as well? Hard to imagine that what had been little more than a collection of cells could have satisfied this thing's appetite, but who knew?

  Roger jabbed the fork into one of the steaks and held it up for inspection. Almost, but not quite. He returned it to the grill and, as he did, caught me looking at him. He raised his glass—his attempt at a cease-fire, if not an apology—and without thinking, I repeated the gesture, which brought a smile from him. My glass was already empty. I hadn't been aware of finishing it. If I didn't take it easy, I was going to be asleep before the end of the meal. I rinsed it and settled on water for the time being.

  I knew how much of what I was thinking was supposition, and of the craziest kind. It made sense, though. It gathered what had happened and arranged it into a coherent pattern. During my conversation with Dr. Hawkins, she'd said, "We're all continuously trying to invent a narrative that will account for our lives." At the time, her statement had struck me as one more platitude, but in the weeks since, it had stuck with me. It's at the root of psychoanalysis, isn't it? Instead of calling it "the talking cure," we should call it "the storytelling cure." Dickens tries to come to terms with his childhood traumas, his adult ambivalences, by writing about them over and over. Hawthorne tries to clarify his Puritan legacy to himself in story after story. Whenever something happens to you—something too much—you create a story to deal with it, to define if not contain it. I had done exactly that—it's just, where most people's stories are written by Anne Tyler, mine was by Anne Rice.

  Not that it was a perfect story. There were all kinds of things it couldn't account for—or hadn't yet, if I wanted to be optimistic. A lot—enough of what I'd been through didn't fit my explanation especially well. Ted revealing himself at the Vineyard diner—okay, I could believe that had been done to torment me. My sensations inside Belvedere House, though, my view of that nighttime landscape outside the kitchen window? Granted, they'd been strange, confusing. I supposed you could say they'd caused me sufficient discomfort to provide the thing in the corner a snack, but that didn't seem their intention—if they'd had an intention, if they hadn't been random occurrences. I didn't need my story to explain Roger's sleepwalking—I'd already known he had guilt to spare. It didn't explain the strange map he stared at during the second part of each sleepwalk, that combination of geography, history, and physics with Ted's old shaving mirror winking at its center.

  Most importantly, the narrative I'd arrived at didn't tell me why I should be the one having all the weirdness visited on her, while Roger got off scot-free. There was no doubt that, on some level, he was horrified at what he'd done. He'd have to be. Maybe that was enough for the thing. Although you would have thought that letting Roger see what he'd done to Ted would have increased his suffering that much more, made the thing's meal that much richer. Yes, there was the vision Roger claimed to have had of the figure wandering the corridor—the figure he himself had assumed was Ted. That was pretty bad, I supposed, but nothing like my up-close-and-personal view of Ted. Was this the thing's way of rewarding Roger for having pronounced the curse? It seemed unlikely, to say the least.

  The sliding door rasped, and Roger said, "Dinner is served." I went to the fridge for the salad, tossing my water in the sink on the way. Roger poured me a fresh glass of wine when I sat down. I raised it and said, "To Tennyson."

  Roger smirked and said, "To the impudence of youth."

  He'd grilled the steaks medium, a little rarer than I liked, a little more done than he did. Despite that, they were tasty, and the salad was a crisp, green complement to them. As we ate, we made small talk about the Cape House. Roger finished his second glass of wine. I poured him number three. A flush was already creeping up his cheeks. "What about you?" he asked, pointing at my glass, still mostly full, with his fork.

  "Don't worry about me."

  By dinner's end, Roger had drunk four and half glasses of wine to my two. His face was rosy, but his speech was clear and coherent. He was desperate to ask me about the Vineyard, but had decided it was better to wait. I'm sure he was afraid of provoking another freak-out, and no Coke at hand. We cleared the table, washed and dried the dishes, filling the air with more mindless chatter, and I reached to the top of the fridge for the bag containing the two bottles of Glenkinchie. Roger hadn't known I'd bought them, and his eyes widened as I withdrew first one, then the other. "What's this?" he asked, unable not to smile as he held the bottles up for inspection. "I thought you didn't care for Scotch?"

  "After the day I've had," I said, "I need something with more fortitude than wine. I was hoping you could make the drinks?"

  "With pleasure. Do we have any soda water?"

  "In the fridge."

  "Excellent," Roger said. "You've thought of everything."

  Well, not everything, I thought while he searched for a pair of suitable glasses. I still don't know why your son is giving me the all-out, special-effects extravaganza, while the worst thing you have to worry about is thinking you hear someone call your name inside a crowded building. Roger uncorked the Scotch, twisted the cap off the soda water, and combined the two, favoring the liquor over the soda—to help me talk, I realized. Oh, irony. He passed me my drink, bubbles pushing their way through the honey-colored liquid, and said, "To what shall we drink?"

  "We've already saluted Tennyson," I said, "any other poets you'd like to recognize?"

  "Very funny."

  I considered proposing a toast to the honesty that was essential to the success of our marriage, but I didn't think I could manage it without tipping my hand too early. Roger solved the problem by saying, "To a fine meal, expertly prepared all around." I tasted the drink. It was as astringent as ever—with the soda water added, it was like medicine-flavored soda. Nevertheless, I smiled as if the thirty dollars a bottle had been worth it.

  "Shall we retire outside?" Roger asked. "I don't believe the mosquitoes are particularly bad as yet."

  "That's fine," I said. "Why don't you grab the Scotch, and I'll take the soda, to save us having to come inside every five minutes."

  "Inspired thinking." Roger grabbed the bottle by the neck and led the way out to the backyard table.

  The evening was pleasant, the sun at the treetops, about to begin its final plunge, the air warm and smelling faintly of the ocean. We deposited the bottles on the picnic table and seated ourselves at it. Roger inhaled and said, "I have to admit, I love the sea air. There's something so inv
igorating about it, don't you think?"

  "Mmm."

  He drank from his glass. Here it comes, I thought. He said, "Before—just now, when I asked you about your selection of the Glenkinchie, you made reference to the day's events."

  "I did."

  "Yes. I don't want you to feel pressured in any way by what I'm going to ask you. If you don't want to speak about what you went through on the Vineyard—if you aren't ready, if you're never ready—there's absolutely no need for you to do so. However, should you—"

  "I saw Ted."

  Roger breathed in sharply. My words hung between us, almost visible. "You saw him?"

  "Yes."

  "Where? On the carousel? The diner?"

  "Both. I had a glimpse of him standing behind me on the carousel—in one of the mirrors—and I saw him face-to-face in the diner. It was only for a second—less—but it was Ted."

  "My God," Roger said. "I knew—I was certain something—that you'd seen." He finished his drink and poured a second from the Scotch bottle alone. When he'd drunk half of that, he coughed, and said, "Judging from your reaction to him, I take it the encounter was not pleasant."