The House That Jack Built

by Graham Masterton

  Morton slammed his station wagon door and trudged towards the house. He was big and balding, with a face that had the pale lumpy texture of a root vegetable. He blinked a lot and wore rimless spectacles with clip-on sunglasses, which he lifted up whenever he went indoors, so that he looked like a croupier. His shirt was already stained with sweat and his beige cotton trousers were impossibly creased. They were held up with withered, once-jazzy suspenders, in scarlet and green. They were the last Christmas present that his wife Audrey had given him, before she took seventy-six paracetamol tablets and died of liver failure. He had never known why. She hadn't even given him the consolation of a suicide note.

  He took out the keys to Valhalla and sneezed twice. Hay fever. Or maybe he was allergic to huge, half-collapsed buildings. As he turned the key in the door, he thought he heard Brewster's car coming, but when he turned around there was nobody there: only the mossy, overgrown terraces, wavering in the mid-morning heat. Only the shrunken oaks; and the overgrown tennis courts; and crickets chirruping from the cracks in the bricks.

  He stepped inside and closed the door behind him. He looked around him, right and left, with a feeling of profound misgiving. Even in the hallway, he could sense the extent of Valhalla's collapse. It was like ground beef, when you knew that it had turned. It didn't smell too bad, but nothing would ever persuade you to eat it.

  'Well… the general structure of the entrance hall seems reasonably sound,' he told his cassette-recorder. 'All of the glazing will require repair or replacement, but the ultimate cost will depend on how closely you wish to reproduce the original windows. The glass is bubbled and slightly yellow-tinted. It was made by hand, and fitted by hand, too. I couldn't give an exact estimate on replacing the windows, not without finding out if anybody today is still capable of doing glazing work like this. Obviously we're talking six figures; and this is just the entrance hall.'

  He walked across to the left-hand staircase and bent over to examine its treads and its risers. 'Left-hand staircase is original… it's been repaired, here and there, and probably quite recently by the Fishkill Corporation. It's unusual in that it's been constructed without the use of nails, and with only a minimal number of pegs. In fact it's virtually self-supporting. Very interesting. Good thing it's in reasonable condition: a modern carpenter just couldn't do it. None that I know of, anyhow.'

  So Morton wandered from silent room to silent room, his voice occasionally echoing from the marble floors and the dulled oak panelling and the high, flaking ceilings.

  Slanted bars of sunshine lined the corridors, and Morton walked through them in swirls of golden dust. He had the strangest feeling that he was intruding - a feeling which he only had when the house that he was surveying was occupied. He stopped, and listened, but all he could hear was the miniaturised sound of distant traffic, and the cawing of a raven in the oak trees.

  He was satisfied that the ballroom would need little more than cleaning up; but once he had walked into the library he began to see the scale of Valhalla's decay.

  'Dry rot, wet rot, extensive termite infestation… some of the floor joists are on the point of collapse, and all of the panelling has to be replaced.'

  He left the library and paused for a moment at the foot of the secondary staircase, looking up to the landing. From here, through the balustrade, he could just see the hunched figure of plaster and moss that had unsettled Effie so much. He stared at it for longer than he meant to; almost as if he were expecting it to move. It stared directly back at him with its soulless, dripping eye.

  He shook his head, and said, 'Jesus H. Christ, Morton, what's the matter with you?' Then he carried on through to the kitchens.

  The kitchens were chilly and shadowy and cavernous, and fitted with all the latest equipment for 1929. Along one wall there was a cream-coloured enamel range which was large enough to cook for a decent-sized hotel, and along the opposite wall were glass-fronted cupboards capable of storing hundreds of plates. The floor was quarry-tiled, and seemed solid enough, but many of the tiles were cracked, and there was no doubt that the entire kitchen area would have to be gutted and brought up-to-date.

  The kitchen window looked out onto a surrealistically-overgrown vegetable garden, where knobbly sprouts had grown to the size of small trees, and asparagus waved tall and feathery in the summer breeze. There were huge rhubarb leaves and giant thistle-like artichokes and everything was tangled with creepers and tendrils as if the vegetables were deliberately strangling each other in their struggle to survive.

  At the far end of the kitchen, on the left, Morton saw a cream-painted door. He checked it on the faded blueprint plan that Walter Van Buren had given him. This led down to the cellars. He turned the key in the door and peered inside. A flight of wooden steps led directly into total darkness. He took out his flashlight and pointed it one way, and then the other, but the darkness was so intense that the pencil-thin beam scarcely seemed to illuminate anything at all, except the wooden handrail, and a dangling light-socket, and a bundle of greasy-looking rags that were hanging from a hook on the ceiling.

  He was just about to go down into the cellar when he was sure that he heard footsteps. It sounded like somebody running quickly downstairs: a man, wearing light-soled shoes. He hesitated, one hand clasping the door frame, one hand pointing his flashlight into the darkness. He listened, but Valhalla had fallen silent again.

  'Brewster?' he called. 'Brewster, is that you?'

  Silence. Dust fell ceaselessly down, in every room, as if Valhalla were quietly demolishing itself, a process that might take centuries. Look on my works, O ye mighty, and despair.

  'Brewster, if that's you I'm in the kitchen… just going down to check out the cellar.'

  Still no reply. He must have been hearing things. He ventured cautiously down the cellar steps, making sure that he held on tight to the handrail. He had heard of too many surveyors falling ass-over-apex down the steps of unfamiliar basements, and he had trodden through too many termite-infested treads to trust the appearance of even the most solid-looking staircase.

  He reached the cellar floor. Like the kitchen, the cellar was quarry-tiled throughout, and stretched all the way from one end of Valhalla to the other. The floor was slippery with wet, and Morton could hear dripping from several directions, although the vaulted arches that held up the ceiling made it difficult for him to see where the water was coming from. He shone his flashlight towards the front of the house, and he could see that it was drier there, although apparent dryness didn't mean that the foundations weren't rotten. He took out his penknife and scraped at one of the walls, just to make sure that the limestone wasn't dissolving. There was no future in restoring Valhalla if it was in danger of complete collapse.

  Whistling between his teeth, he walked between the first two vaulted arches until he found the oil-fired boilers. They were dulled and rusted, but he could still see traces of red enamel, and the words Capitol Red Top embossed on them. Good boilers, in 1929. If they were restored, they could probably do the job of heating Valhalla, even today.

  He explored a little further. He heard rats scurrying and scratching in the furthest recesses of the cellars. They weren't used to intrusion. They must have proliferated in this lightless subterranean kingdom for so long now that they thought it was theirs. Well, Morton knew a man at Albany Exterminators who could show them different, but that was another expensive item to add to the estimate.

  Some of the pipework to the radiators had been half dismanded: maybe it had sprung a leak and somebody had tried to cap it off. A single vertical pipe, five feet high, stood in the centre of one of the alcoves and led to nothing at all. Morton shone his flashlight at the ceiling immediately above it and saw that it was black with wet rot and speckled with mould. God almighty, this house was going to take a fortune to put to rights, even if the Bellmans cut corners.

  He was still looking around when he heard footsteps crossing the ceiling above his head. They sounded the same as the footsteps he had h
eard before: lightly-shod, in slippers or pumps, but a man's footsteps, no doubt about it. They seemed to cross the room above diagonally, and he guessed that it was probably the library, where he had noticed before that the floor was seriously rotted.

  'Brewster!' he shouted out. 'I'm down here, Brewster, checking out the boilers!'

  He waited for Brewster to come down the steps, but Brewster didn't appear. Nobody appeared. He thought about exploring further, but when he shone his flashlight directly ahead, he saw a tawny-grey rush of rats at the very end of the cellars, and he decided against it. He could make a full inspection if and when the exterminators had done what they had to do. He took a last perfunctory look around the alcoves on either side, and then started to walk back.

  'The integrity of some of the load-bearing limestone piers looks suspect… we'll have to carry out some analysis. They could be reinforced with concrete pilings, but without detailed structural analysis it's going to be hard to tell how extensive that reinforcement would have to be. Again, we're talking six figures. Low six figures, but six figures all the same.'

  He climbed the steps back to the kitchen, closed the door and locked it. Outside, in the kitchen garden, the giant rhubarb leaves still glittered with the morning dew, and cobwebs glittered, too. He crossed the kitchen and opened the door to the hallway.

  As he did so, he glimpsed a shadow on the wall at the top of the staircase, and he heard the chiff-chiff-chiff of shoe soles on the stairs.

  'Brewster?' he called. 'Brewster, is that you?'

  He started to climb the stairs after him, pulling himself up with the banister rail. 'If you're not Brewster, then you'd better come on down here, mister, because this is private property and you're trespassing!'

  He reached the top of the stairs, and looked up to the next flight. Halfway up, the nun stood in the lily field with her eyes closed. Morton paused for a moment to catch his breath, then continued to climb up. But when he reached the third-storey landing, there was nobody in sight. Not down the left-hand corridor, not down the corridor right in front of him, not down the corridor that led off to his right, the corridor with the half-collapsed ceiling.

  Morton listened keenly. The wind was very light, but the day was hot, so that Valhalla creaked and complained with the normal expansion of metal and wood. He couldn't get over the feeling that he wasn't supposed to be here at all, that he was intruding. When he spoke into his cassette-recorder, he spoke in a very quiet voice indeed, in case he was overheard (though by whom? or by what?).

  'Third storey, south corridor, headed east. Serious roof collapses for the first hundred feet; and water penetration, too, going right through the building, floor after floor.'

  He climbed with difficulty over the heaps of broken tiles and splintered rafters and squirrels' nest. 'Again… serious rodent infestation in the loft spaces… in fact the whole of this house is a goddamned menagerie. We're talking five-and-a-half thousand for extermination minimum.'

  He pushed against the door of the first bedroom that he came to. It was stiff, but two or three good shoves managed to get it open. It was carpeted in pale, faded blue, and there was a dark rust-coloured stain in the centre of the floor. Morton paced across the room to the window. He looked at the view of Valhalla's chimneys, and the trees beyond. Then he turned back to look at the floor stain. It looked to Morton like a devil, or a goat, or the shadow that his grandmother used to cast on the wall when she was telling him stories all those years ago, when he was a boy. She used to fold her headscarf into peaks, so that she looked as if she had horns. Grimm's fairy tales, she used to tell him, crowded to the rafters with child-eating ogres and hunchbacked hobgoblins.

  Something lurched. Just an old joist. Somewhere, a door closed. Even the softest of draughts never closed a door that quietly.

  Morton looked around, his breath wheezing asthmatically. Empty houses had never alarmed him before, but this one did. He was sure that he could hear people breathing, just behind his back. He was sure that he was not alone, and that somebody was standing very close to him, watching every move that he made.

  This room in particular felt stifling and claustrophobic, and he was beginning to realise that it stank, too, of kerosene and cheap women's perfume and cockroach powder and something worse, he didn't know what it was. He hadn't noticed it before, but maybe the wind had dropped. Yet how could it smell so strongly if nobody had occupied Valhalla for so many years? Somebody must have been squatting here recently, or the stench would have faded long ago. Maybe somebody was squatting here now.

  He turned back to the bedroom door. He had opened it flat against the wall, so that anybody could have hidden behind it. He hesitated, then slammed it shut, shouting out loud as he did so. But of course there was nobody there. Only a brownish cruciform mark on the wallpaper where an effigy of Christ had hung.

  'Goddamn it,' said Morton. He reopened the door and looked out into the corridor. All he could see was heaps of tiles, and a flapping black wing of abandoned tarpaper. Through the collapsed roof, the sun was burning off the morning mist, and everything was blurry and gilded. The landscape was so dazzling that, for a moment, he was temporarily blinded.

  'Okay, I know there's somebody here!' he shouted, very emphatically. 'There's somebody here! I know you're here! There's no use hiding!'

  He waited, sweating; and then he thought he heard somebody say something abusive, right in his ear, quietly. It sounded like '… cretin', with an unintelligible swearword. He turned, furious, but there was nobody there. It was only when he turned back the other way that he saw a man in a dark suit walking away from him, at the very far end of the corridor, a man who appeared to be brushing his sleeves and buttoning his gloves.

  'You!' he called out. 'You, sir! What the hell do you think you're doing here? This is private property!'

  The man stopped at the very end of the corridor, and peered back at Morton with obvious bewilderment. Then, still buttoning his right-hand glove, he turned the corner and disappeared.

  Morton hadn't taken any exercise in years. But he was determined to catch this trespasser. He shouted, 'Hoi!' and 'Hoi!' and 'You just wait up there, pal!' and he started to run along the corridor in lumbering pursuit.

  For a few seconds, he was running like an athlete, his head held high, his lungs expanded, his fists punching. He ran through all the golden triangles of sunlight that fell across the corridor.

  'You're trespassing!' he bellowed. And then his left foot went right through the floorboards, in a thick, woody explosion of dry-rot dust and stick-thin lathes and rendering.

  He thought it was impossible, to drop clear through a floor, and that was why he didn't shout out. But he burst out of the ceiling into the music-room below, lacerating his arms, and tearing his face and ripping his shirt into plastery rags, and then he dropped another twenty feet. He felt that he was flying, with nothing to grab on to, but then he hit the floor, with a thudding impact that broke his collar bone and knocked the wind out of him. Immediately, the music-room floor collapsed, too, in a powdery shower of timber-dust and plaster, and Morton dropped again, another twenty feet. He saw a window fall past him. He saw shelves and walls. Then he plunged concussed like a diver through the wet rot that had turned the library floor into sodden flakes of yielding wood, and into the cellar.

  The vertical, capped-off heating pipe was waiting for him. He dropped directly onto it, and it tore through his upper left thigh muscle and into his pelvis, penetrating his large intesunes, piercing his liver, and puncturing his right lung, missing his heart by less than a quarter of an inch.

  He roared in agony, and a fine spray of blood blasted out of his mouth. He was transfixed, helplessly kicking and waving his arms. His feet were three or four inches clear of the cellar floor, so that all he could do was to pedal, and the more he pedalled the deeper the heating pipe sank into his body.

  'Oh God help-' he tried to shout out. Then, 'Oh God help me!'

  The pain of being impaled by a cold metal p
ipe was more than he could bear. He could feel it running right up inside him, right through his bowels and into his stomach. He could feel it in his lung, which blathered and wheeled like a wet balloon. But when he struggled, the pipe inched up further, until it was touching the inside of his ribcage, the pain was even greater, and he forced himself to stay still.

  He felt agonised, half-concussed, but he couldn't believe that he was still alive. He didn't know whether he wanted to live or die. God knows what damage the pipe had done to his insides. Blood was trickling down it, and spreading across the tiled floor. If he couldn't get himself free, he would probably bleed to death in a matter of minutes, and then what he wanted would be academic.

  Where the hell was Brewster? If Brewster were here, he could help to lift him off. But then the pain was so cold and intense that he didn't know whether he wanted to be lifted off. He couldn't bear the thought of the pipe sliding out of him.

  Oh Christ, he thought, what did I do to deserve this? Maybe this is my punishment for what happened to Audrey. Maybe she took her life because of me, because I ignored her, because I took her so much for granted, and this is what I have to suffer in return.

  He closed his eyes but all he could see was scarlet. He was trying to remain still, but his weight was gradually pushing him further and further down. He could feel the top of the pipe pressing against his upper ribs now, and that was a very special kind of pain that made him suck in his breath and start to whimper.

  It seemed as if hours went by. He faded in and out of consciousness, but the pain never went away. He dreamed that he was sitting at home, talking to Audrey, asking her what she was doing. Audrey had nearly completed a jigsaw which was spread out on a tea tray on her lap. Her face was very pale, the colour of uncooked pastry. The light which came through the sitting-room window was scarlet, and lit up her hair. The jigsaw was very strange. It showed people walking around a garden with their eyes closed. They looked as if they were asleep. Audrey said, 'Life is just like a book. Don't you understand?'