The House That Jack Built

by Graham Masterton

  He turned away.

  'I won't tell no one,' Scuzz whimpered. 'I swear to God I won't tell no one.'

  'You promise?' he asked her, with his back to her.

  'I swear to God.'

  WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 11:29 A.M.

  When Effie came downstairs, Pepper was already waiting for her in the hotel entrance hall, flicking through a copy of Architectural Digest. She was wearing a maroon kaftan and black broad-brimmed hat with maroon ostrich feathers in it. And a huge ungainly woven bag lay on the floor beside her like a slumbering dog.

  Effie said, 'I'm sorry, Pepper. I'm not sure that I can go. Craig just called. His partner was found dead this morning. Somebody stabbed him.'

  'Oh, you're kidding! That's just awful. Do they know how it happened?'

  'The police didn't tell him very much, only that he was found in some girl's apartment. The girl was murdered, too.'

  'God, that's terrible. You don't feel like you're safe anywhere any more.'

  'Craig's calling me back later to tell me what he's doing.'

  'Let's take a raincheck,' said Pepper, laying a hand on her arm. 'Really. You won't feel like doing any psychic stuff today.'

  'No, I do,' said Effie; and she did. She was beginning to feel that her life was being swept away, like a paper boat in a storm drain. Valhalla, Gaby, and now this. She needed to do something positive to bring her destiny back under control. 'It's just that Craig said that he might want me back in the city.'

  Pepper looked at her watch. 'If you really want to go, we won't take very long; no more than an hour. Why don't you leave a message at the desk?'

  'Well, I guess,' said Effie. She thought for a moment. She knew that Craig was distressed. She was distressed, herself, even though she hadn't liked Steven from the moment that Craig had first introduced him. He may have been a balding, boring, out-and-out chauvinist; but he wa§, a human being; and somebody had once been sufficiently in love to conceive him, and give birth to him, and bring him up. However unappealing anybody had been, it was always tragic when they died too young.

  But she thought of her future; and Valhalla; and she said, 'Okay,' and went to the desk and rang the bell.

  'Was he a close friend of yours, Craig's partner?' Pepper asked her, leaning against the desk.

  Effie crossed her fingers. 'He and Craig were like this. Inseparable. Craig had known him since law school. I know I shouldn't speak ill of the dead, but I never liked him very much. He was always so pushy. I don't think that Craig would have been so aggressive if it hadn't have been for Steven. Apart from that, he was always making eyes at me, following me into the kitchen at parties. One of those guys who can never keep their hands to themselves.'

  'I know the kind. I used to call them octopi until I found out how intelligent octopi are. They say that octopi could write poetry except that their ink keeps running.' She paused, and then she said. Joke. Except that it's almost true.'

  Wendy O'Brien the innkeeper came out and Effie asked her to take any messages from Craig.

  'Are you all right, Mrs. Bellman?' Wendy O'Brien frowned at her. 'You're looking a little pale, if you'll forgive me for saying so.'

  'I'm fine,' Effie assured her. Pepper took hold of her hand, and squeezed it; and Effie suddenly realised that she had made a very close friend.

  They drove through the trees and up past Red Oaks Inn. The sky was filled with huge, creamy cumulus clouds, as if the whole of Georgia's cotton crop had been lifted up and carried north-east by the wind, on its way to Labrador, or who knew where. Effie said, 'Norman told us you used to work for the Berrymans.'

  Pepper smiled. 'Oh, yes. They were great, the Berrymans. I think they probably came from another planet, because I never met Earth people so nice. They had that unearthly quality about them, don't you think, like people in the The Twilight Zone or This Island Earth or one of those old fifties science-fiction movies.'

  'We probably saw each other, back then,' said Effie. 'My father used to take me here for brunch, as a special treat.' She smiled at the memory. 'I used to look through the stained-glass window, do you remember that? They had a stained-glass window in the front door. I used to look through it, and I could see people walking about, people who weren't really there.'

  'What?' said Pepper.

  They were driving through water, in a sizzle of spray.

  'I saw people in the window, in the coloured glass.'

  'Which colour, in particular?'

  'The red. It was always the red. But why? They weren't real, were they?'

  'The red, for God's sake,' said Pepper.

  'What's wrong with that? It was only imagination. There was nobody there. I used to open the door and look out of it, and there was never anybody there.'

  Pepper said, 'You weren't to know it, but red is the only colour of the spectrum through which you can perceive parallel reality.'

  'What does that mean?'

  'Well, let's put it this way. Some people think that time is like a continuous line… and we're all moving along it like driving down some long highway that goes off towards the horizon like an endless ribbon. But other people think it loops in a circle, which means that one day, we're going to be doing the same thing all over again. Eternal recurrence, that's what Nietszche called it. Poor old Nietzsche, so misunderstood. So misinterpreted, but aren't we all? And then some people think that time is like a loop, a Moebius strip; and other people think that it goes fast or slow.

  'But time isn't like that at all. Time isn't linear; and it isn't sequential. Everything that ever happened is simultaneous. You were born today. You graduated today. You met your husband today. You grew old today. You died. Everything happens at once. It's only the way you perceive it that makes it seem like one thing happens after another.'

  'I don't understand you at all,' said Effie. 'I know what happened yesterday; but yesterday's gone, I've lived through it, and now it's gone. How can it still be there?'

  'It's there because it's there. That's all. Didn't it feel real, when you lived through it?'

  'Of course it did.'

  'It felt real because it is real. Life is just like a book, that's what you don't understand. That's what nobody understands. Life is like a book because it's all there, all in one piece. The beginning, the middle and the end, and you can pick it up at any time, wherever you want. You can read the end of Gone With The Wind… "After all, tomorrow is another day"… and then you can go right back to the beginning… "Scarlett O'Hara was not beautiful"… or anyplace else you like, the dead man's head bumping down the stairs and Melanie covering her ears, Atlanta burning… Atlanta before it was burnt… it all happens now. Like, there isn't any "yesterday". Why should there be? It wasn't "yesterday" when you were living it, was it? Just like we're driving up this road now. Are we driving "yesterday"? We'll think we were, tomorrow. But "yesterday" we were driving up here "tomorrow." '

  'I think I lost you about three sentences ago,' laughed Effie.

  'No, you didn't. Because you looked through the red glass and you saw people who weren't really there. The point was, they were there. Or they had been there, at one time. If you look through red glass, you can see things that were; and things that are going to be.'

  'You mean, when I saw that man crossing the parking-lot -'

  'Outside the Red Oaks Inn, when you were a child? Yes… that was somebody from the past, or maybe the future.' Effie shook her head. 'I don't believe it. I can't believe it.' Pepper laid a hand on her sleeve. 'It doesn't matter, so long as you know about it.'

  They drove on towards the gates of Valhalla. 'Maybe this is a bad idea,' said Effie. She was beginning to feel deeply disturbed; not only by what had happened, but by Pepper's interpretation of it. If she understood Pepper correctly, she was saying that your entire life happened simultaneously, that, and that all you did was move forward from one sequence to the next, like reading a book. But if the past still existed, did that mean you could also move back?

  Pepper said, 'Yo
u'd be surprised how many good things happen as the result of bad ideas.'

  Valhalla lay under the shadow of a large cloud, which made it look unnaturally dark and forbidding. Ravens wheeled around its chimney stacks.

  'Norman used to love coming here, when he was a boy. I never liked the house itself, but I love the location, don't you? It's so wild and so weird. Did you ever read Tanglewood Tales? "The border between the seen and the unseen." It makes me shiver!'

  They drove up to the headless statue and climbed out of the car. Pepper dragged her big woven bag out of the boot and hefted it up the steps. Effie sorted through Craig's key ring until she found the right key, and opened up the front doors.

  As they stepped into the hallway, a pigeon suddenly burst from its perch on the balcony and fluttered furiously around the ceiling. They both jumped in fright.

  Although they could see bright blue sky through the broken windows, the hallway was shadowy and cold. Pepper put down her bag and opened it up, rummaging through books and bottles and rattles and tins and extraordinary hanks of hair and vegetable-dyed rags. At last she produced a dried-up hazel twig, a slender fork in the shape of a wide Y; a greenish copper salt-shaker; and an amber glass jar.

  'Essence of lilies,' she explained. 'I thought I'd bring some along.'

  'What's that supposed to do?' asked Effie.

  'The lily is the flower of the moon. It brings madness, the same way the moon brings madness. Essence of lily is very good for quietening places where psychic vibrations have gotten out of hand. It disrupts the nexus, turns the vibrations in on themselves, stands logic on its head.'

  She twisted her wrists around and took hold of each branch of her hazel twig.

  'Where did you learn all of this?' asked Effie, with a smile.

  Pepper slowly swung the hazel from left to right, and back again. 'My parents left me, after Woodstock. I talked to shamans and witches and all kinds of people. Some of them were crazy. Some of them were very crazy. But between them, they taught me so many things. How to make candles in the shape of human hands, the Hand of Glory, so that I could find treasure. How to throw horseshoes over my shoulder, to stop the Devil from following me. They taught me all about vegetables and herbs and the magic pantry. It doesn't work, most of it. But some of it really does; and when it does, it's incredible. It blows your socks off.'

  She paused, feeling the twig. Then she said, 'There's a twitch here, but nothing too much. Let's move on.'

  'A twitch?'

  'It's like somebody trembling… here, feel it. It's like somebody trying to pull your hands away.'

  Effie touched the twig, and it was quivering. Electric, erectile, like the tail of a dog on heat.

  'It's incredible,' she said. 'How does it work?'

  'Hazel picks up psychic disturbance the same way that iron attracts lightning. But it doesn't work for everybody. You have to be very passive. You have to think inward rather than outward, if you understand what I mean. You have to encourage the vibrations to enter your head, welcome them in, and not many people can do that.'

  She walked across the hallway until she reached the door, pausing every now and then to make sure that she was following the strongest of the psychic currents. 'You remember Ghost Busters? They would never have found any psychic phenomena. They were far too aggressive. You can't hunt down a memory, or a feeling of regret, or a moment of terror. They're too elusive, too faint. They exist right on the very edge of yesterday, or in the very first suggestion of tomorrow.'

  Effie thought that Pepper was beginning to sound very much too Aquarian, but she didn't say so. She could see the hazel frantically quivering, and nobody could have made it do that simply by shaking it. Every now and then, it twitched upward, quite violently, as if somebody had flicked it, and when it did so, Pepper let out a little gasp of effort. 'It's strong here… I never felt anything so strong before.'

  'What do you think it is?'

  'Right here, in this corridor, it's movement, it's almost certainly human movement. I get the feeling of lots of very excited people, rushing along the corridor towards the ballroom. They're rushing along here all the time, a stream of them. They're excited. Frightened too. I get this feeling of delicious dread, like they're all hurrying to see something really terrible.'

  The hazel twitched upward again and again, and each time it twitched up further. Soon it was rearing up so high that Effie couldn't understand how it didn't snap.

  Pepper began to walk faster. 'There's so much panic,' she said. Her face was drained of colour and her eyes were wide. 'There's so much fear! They don't want to see it, but they don't want to miss it, either!'

  By the time they reached the ballroom, they were practically running. The doors were closed, and they stopped in front of them. Effie had the irrational feeling that beyond there was nothing but a vacuum, and that if they opened them up, they would be sucked into absolute emptiness. Her feeling of terror was so strong that she could hear her heart beating like somebody wildly beating a cushion with a stick.

  'Oh my God,' said Pepper. 'I can hardly hold it.'

  The hazel had bent back so far that it was pointing at the runic medallion that hung around her neck. Effie took hold of her arm and she could feel the effort that Pepper was having to make just to keep the twig from flying out of her hands. All the same, it didn't crack, didn't even splinter.

  'What is it?' she asked, aghast. 'Why is it bending itself back like that?'

  'I can't- it won't- it refuses?

  'What do you mean it refuses? Pepper! It's only a twig, and you're holding it!'

  Pepper stared at her with those glittering silver eyes, swallowing hard. 'I mean that I won't go any further. Not in there. I can't.'

  She hesitated for one more moment, and then she flung the twig away from her, across the corridor, as if she had suddenly seen an earwig crawling up it. It fell beneath one of the windows, and gradually unbent itself.

  'Pepper,' said Effie, 'what is it? What's wrong?'

  'I don't know,' she trembled. She was shaking, and she kept anxiously rubbing her arm. 'Whatever it is, I can't face it. It's far too strong… it's so much stronger than it ever was before. Maybe it's me, maybe it's you. I don't know. But if you could feel what I felt-'

  Effie glanced at the twig. 'Maybe I should try.'

  'No, don't. You probably wouldn't feel anything, but you never know. You may be more sensitive than you think.'

  'But what was it?'

  'It was like a darkness… a kind of emptiness. I can't describe it. I just felt that something totally grotesque was going on.'

  Effie bit her lip. She didn't know what to think about any of this. There was obviously something wrong here at Valhalla, but was it really 'psychic vibration'? She enjoyed Pepper's mysticism, her magic pantry and her lexicon of spells, but could Pepper really give her a rational explanation of what was happening, so that they could exorcise it, or whatever they had to do? She was beginning to feel that the answers to her problems would be found in the real world, rather than the world of spirits and dreams and hedge-magic.

  'You don't want to try again?' she asked Pepper.

  Pepper shook her head. 'I'm sorry, Effie. I didn't want to let you down. But-' she looked towards the closed ballroom doors and her eyes said it all. 'There's dread in there, Effie. You don't have any idea.'

  Effie shook her head. 'You haven't let me down, I promise. I'll just have to talk to Craig about it, and see what he thinks.'

  'You're going to tell Craig?'

  'What else can I do?'

  'But that feeling you had, that you shouldn't tell him about it. I wouldn't ignore that feeling, if I were you.'

  'I have to do something. I can't think of living here, the way it is, no matter what's wrong with it.'

  'Effie… a woman from another time was appealing to you… begging you not to tell him. Don't you think that you ought to respect that appeal, at least for now? At least until you find out why she doesn't want you to tell him.'r />
  Effie said, 'I'm very confused. I really am.'

  Pepper looked quickly at the ballroom doors. 'We ought to go.'

  But Effie stayed where she was, thinking. There had to be some rational explanation for all of this - for the sobbing woman and the man on the stairs. Gut ist der Schlaf… der Tod ist besser.

  'You really can't do any more?' she asked Pepper.

  Pepper said, 'I'm sorry.' She clasped her hand against her forehead as if she had a headache. 'It makes me feel as if I'm just about to die.'

  'I just want to know what it is? You say there's dread in here, but what does that mean? Dread?'

  'Effie, leave it.'

  But Effie, in frustration, pushed the doors wide open. She wasn't sucked into oblivion. There was no vacuum, no darkness. Only the stately gloom of the ballroom, with the clogged-up light from the glass dome high above it, and the pillars and the balcony.

  And then - in the blink of an eye - she was right in the centre of the floor, and the lights suddenly brightened, and she was dancing. She couldn't think how she had got there, or why she was dancing. She couldn't hear music at first, but then she could. It was Strauss, and she hated Strauss, but she couldn't stop dancing. She went around and around the floor, and all she could see was a circling blur of pillars and lights and blurry faces.

  Because there were people here, the ballroom was crowded with people.

  She was so startled that she couldn't catch her breath. She felt as if she had suddenly stepped into the ocean, out of her depth. She twisted her head around, trying to see where Pepper was, but all she could see were pale, unfocused faces. She tried to stop herself from dancing, but strong male arms enclosed themselves around her and swept her away, and she turned back in amazement to see that she was dancing with a tall man in white tie and tails. She could feel the grasp of his warm, white-gloved hands. She could feel his pristine shirt-front. He danced with power and rhythm, and there was nothing she could do but follow him wherever he led.

  She tried to focus on his face, but even though they were dancing they were dancing so close, all she could see were dark smudgy eyes and a wide grinning mouth. It was like trying to look at him through a pane of glass smeared with Vaseline.