by Anthology
He was right about the talk. He and Ellie picked a building site that same afternoon, Sunday, and Monday morning I bought it for them—a three-and-a-half-acre plot over three hundred feet deep in the best residential section of town. It had been held for years in the hope of a fat price, and now Sam paid it. And less than seventy-two hours after Ellie Cluett dislodged the papers that were the forgotten plans for a forgotten house, its foundation was being laid—of brick, just as the old plans specified.
At first the new house attracted no attention; the wood frame of one house looks just about like any other at the beginning. Then the roof framing began and before it was finished it was plain to everyone passing that these were remarkably steep and complex gables. They intersected in dozens of places; they were pierced by innumerable dormers; at corners, they rose into sharp, narrow peaks, and they projected over—it was suddenly obvious—what were going to become bay windows and an enormous porch. And now all day every day cars crept past and clusters stood on the sidewalk as people watched the steady, skeletal growth in fresh white pine of a brand-new Victorian mansion.
I was just as fascinated. I had plenty of work. Specifying, ordering, and checking up on all the special milling were a job in themselves and I had much more to do. But still I spent more time at the new house than I really had to. Even at night, as though I were the actual architect, I’d sometimes drive over and prowl around and through it. One night I found Ellie standing on the walk, the big collar of her camel’s-hair coat turned up, hands deep in her pockets, looking at the half-finished house.
The house was set far back from the street, and from the sidewalk the eye could take it all in. There was a three-quarter moon; we could see clearly. The new wood looked pale against the night sky and the door and window openings were narrow black rectangles, for the house was no longer skeletal. Most of the exterior sheathing was on, and the external shape of the house was complete. For the first time we could see, rising from the bare wood-littered earth, the beginning reality of what had been only architectural drawings.
Ellie murmured, “Isn’t it astonishing?”
“Yeah.” I was enjoying the almost ghostly sight of this strange unfinished house in the moonlight and I began fooling, playing with words. “We’re looking at a vanished sight. This is a commonplace sight of a world long gone and we’ve reached back and brought it to life again. Maybe we should have let it alone.”
Ellie smiled. “I don’t think so. I feel good about it.”
The work went fast; the men liked this job. Several had grown mustaches or sideburns in styles they thought appropriate to the house. One of the carpenters had just finished a year in New Jersey doing nothing but hanging doors in over nine hundred identical tract houses. He told me this job was the first time carpentering actually was what, as a boy, he’d imagined it to be. Now the siding was on, and the big veranda was complete. All windows were in. Everything was finished outside, in fact, except the eave ornamentation, not yet delivered, and some special-patterned shingle work on the gable ends.
Inside the hammering was constant—inlaid hardwood floors going down on the third floor, interior trim on the first and second. Plastering was finished, complete with old-style wood lathing, and on the first floor, doors were being hung—inches wider, two feet taller, and far heavier and more solid than any ordinarily made today. Their surfaces were beautifully paneled with fine moldings, and they, too, were new-minted and fresh-sanded, not even drilled yet for lock sets. Walking through the house, I’d stop when no one could see me, close my eyes, and sniff the familiar damp-plaster, new-wood fragrance of a just-finished house. Then I’d open my eyes and wonder at the magnificent brand-new old mansion in which, incredibly, I stood.
Sam wanted speed, and got it. When the completed house was still wet with paint, new grass was showing on the landscaped grounds, and transplanted bushes almost surrounded it. He’d had a dozen fir trees trucked to and planted on the grounds at whatever enormous cost—full-grown trees taller than the roof. And five stone masons, all I’d been able to round up, were building a wall clear around the grounds using old gray stone from a dismantled church. And now, the activity of building over and the house painted—entirely white—it lost its visual novelty and took its place in the town. People pausing on the walk dwindled to an occasional one or two.
The day Ellie finished furnishing it she stopped at my office downtown and invited me to see it. We drove in her car, and when we reached the house the great wrought-iron gates stood open in the wall and we swung through them onto a snow-white gravel driveway that curved up to the shaded veranda.
Ellie stopped halfway, giving me a chance to look around. All trace of raw newness was gone; the grounds were lush. This was June and the immense lawns were a flawless, fresh-mowed, brilliant summer green. The hedges were perfectly trimmed and flower beds stood in full bloom.
The house itself was immaculate; it sparkled. It stood there in the splendor of its grounds like a new-cut jewel in a just-finished setting—solid and vigorous, in the very prime of its youth—the living and finished reality of drawings that had lain dustily on my shelves for years.
I had only an impression of the interior when we’d finished—of large-patterned wallpaper suggesting the nineteenth century but colorful, gay, wonderfully cheerful; of last-century furniture intricately but beautifully carved, ornately but gracefully curved, finished to perfection and upholstered in tufted velvets of emerald green, canary yellow, scarlet, coral, and sky blue. I remember a little dressing room carpeted in pink. All doors were dull white, with polished brass hardware. The house sang.
I was out of town on a job the night of the Cluetts’ big party a week later, the housewarming. But I drove back late in the evening and, while I wasn’t dressed to go inside, I stopped my car by the big iron gates and what I saw was the most haunting sight I’ve ever seen.
The house was equipped with two lighting systems. One, which I designed, was electric with concealed outlets and almost unnoticeable flush ceiling lights. The other was gas, the lines following the original plans and with ornate fixtures which Ellie had searched out and bought, in all the principal rooms. Tonight as I sat looking in through the big gates, only the gas system was in use. And on all three floors of the big, rambling house, every window—tall and arched at the tops, looking like rows of great slender candles—glowed against the blue summer night with the yellowy, wonderfully warm light electricity has never equaled.
Dancing couples moved across those rectangles of light and music from a live orchestra moved out through the open windows across the lawns into the darkness. Sam had bought a horse and carriage to meet his New York guests at the railroad station. Tonight he’d hired three more and now they all stood on the white gravel of the curved driveway. Any guest who’d come by car had parked in the street. This was one of the last June nights and the air was balmy and alive with the drone of insects, the very sound of summer; and the lawns, strung with candlelit Japanese lanterns, flickered with fireflies. From the veranda I could hear laughter and the murmur of voices softened by distance and people stood outlined on the glowing candle shapes of the windows. Over and enclosing it all, the backdrop for everything, stood the great dark silhouette of the turreted, dormered, many-gabled house. It was a scene lost to the world, a glimpse of another time and manner of living, and I sat there for a long time before I drove home.
You lose touch with clients fairly quickly once a house is finished. For a time you’re in each other’s company and minds every day, more intimate than friends. Then suddenly you’re busy with someone else. I didn’t see the Cluetts again till well after Labor Day. Then one afternoon on impulse, I stopped in, not sure if they were still there. But they were. Sam met me on the porch in shirt sleeves—it was warm yet—calling to Ellie that I was there. He led me to the end of the veranda. There was a wooden porch swing, and we sat down, lifting our feet to the porch railing.
I said, “No work today, Sam?”
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p; He smiled. “No. Lately I’ve been taking more time off than I used to.”
From the window behind me, I heard steps in the kitchen, and the sound of glassware. Then Ellie appeared in the doorway.
I stared in open astonishment. Ellie—smiling mischievously as she bent forward to set a tray on a little wicker table—was wearing a dress that began high at the neck and snug around it and ended well below her ankles, brushing the porch floor.
It was a soft leaf green and the long sleeves ended at the wrists in lace cuffs. The upper arms weren’t actually puffed but they were full, peaking up a little at the shoulders. It was a dress of the last century and as Ellie sat down I saw that her hair was long now. It was parted in the center and braided and coiled at the back into a flat disk covering the nape of her neck.
Sam was grinning. He said, “You wouldn’t want us to be the only things in the house that weren’t appropriate, would you, Harry? Ellie and I decided we ought to be dressed for the place.” With his fingers he flicked one of his cream-colored pants legs and I saw that they were patterned with a light-blue stripe, a kind of trousers last worn decades ago. Then I realized that his hair wasn’t just overdue for cutting; he was wearing it in a style outmoded when my father was born.
I grinned, too, then. Ellie was pouring from a brown stoneware pitcher beaded with tight little drops, the ice clinking as it slid into the glasses. I said, “You look wonderful, both of you; absolutely right for this house. Your guests must get a kick out of it.”
“Well, as a matter of fact,” Sam said, “we’ve pretty well quit entertaining my customers here. Not many of them really appreciated the place.”
Ellie handed me a filled glass, and I tasted the drink; it was fresh-squeezed lemonade, and delicious. I said, “You must like the house for its own sake, then.”
“I can’t tell you how much,” Ellie said softly. “We’ve moved here permanently, you know. We don’t go to New York any more.”
For half an hour, then, we talked about the house. Ellie told me she even sewed here in a little room at the top of a turret. It was something she’d never before had patience for but she’d actually made the dress she was wearing. She said the pattern for it and even the exact shade just came drifting into her mind one day and she wanted to have it and made it herself.
Presently she said, “I always assumed that the plans for this house had never been used, didn’t you, Harry?” I nodded, and she said, “But it’s just as possible that they were used, isn’t it?”
“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 seating on Sikermanris 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 com
plete 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.
WHO’S CRIBBING?
Jack Lewis
April 2, 1952
Mr. Jack Lewis
90-26 219 St.
Queens Village 28, NY
Dear Mr. Lewis:
We are returning your manuscript, “The Ninth Dimension.” At first glance, I had figured it a story well worthy of publication. Why wouldn’t I? So did the editors of Cosmic Tale back in 1934 when the story was first published.
As you no doubt know, it was the great Todd Thromberry who wrote the story you tried to pass off on us as an original.
Let me give you a word of caution concerning the penalties resulting from plagiarism:
It’s not worth it. Believe me.
Sincerely,
Doyle P. Gates Science Fiction Editor
Deep Space Magazine
April 5, 1952
Mr. Doyle P. Gates,
Editor Deep Space Magazine
New York 3, NY
Dear Mr. Gates:
I do not know, nor am I aware of the existence of any Todd Thromberry. The story you rejected was submitted in good faith, and I resent the inference that I plagiarized it.
“The Ninth Dimension” was written by me not more than a month ago, and if there is any similarity between it and the story written by this Thromberry person, it is purely coincidental.