'Stop,' she tried to say, as he circled the floor for a second time. Her voice sounded flat and plugged-up, and she wasn't certain that she had managed to speak at all.
But the man didn't stop and he didn't reply, either. He kept on dancing to that damned Strauss and everybody watched them as they spun and swayed.
Effie thought that she could hear the people making a dull, baying sound, but it hardly sounded like people at all. They could have been pigs and donkeys dressed up in tails and evening-gowns. She was reminded of some nightmarish nursery-rhyme world, in which animals wore clothes and hats and disdainfully squinted at their human inferiors through monocles, even though they were still just as bestial and dangerous underneath.
'Stop, you're hurting me!' Effie pleaded. But the man continued to sweep her around, with that same irresistible rhythm, and that stretched, almost lunatic grin. What was worse, he was hurting her. He was crushing her fingers together with his right hand, while his left hand seemed to dig into her back. And as her perception heightened, she became conscious of something else, too. A sharp, agonising pricking in the soles of her feet. She tried to break her stride and to pull herself free, but she couldn't - not only because she wasn't strong enough, but because she was just as much caught up in the waltz as he was. She felt as if she were dancing on sharpened kitchen knives, and every step made her calf muscles spasm because she knew that it was going to hurt so much. Yet, madly, she carried on dancing, even when she thought she felt blood on her ankles.
The man said, in a deep, indistinct voice, 'I bet them that you would waltz for me.'
Effie said, 'What? What did you say?'
'I bet them that you would waltz for me, barefoot, on broken glass.'
'What do you mean? Who are you? What do you mean?'
'I said that you would do anything for me… and one of them said, I bet she wouldn't dance for you, barefoot, on broken glass. But here you are, my darling. Here you are!'
'What?' screamed Effie. But the man didn't repeat himself. He swept her round again, and laughed; and the people in the ballroom laughed, too, that hideous sub-human baying. The man turned to the people in the ballroom and lifted his hand in triumph - and in that one instant when he was acknowledging the applause of his admirers, and the waltz momentarily paused, Effie at last managed to twist herself out of the man's embrace, and stop. When she stopped, the music died away, too, disintegrating into discordant squeaks and scrapes and spasmodic drumbeats. The lights dimmed all around the room, until they gave off nothing but a sickly, intermittent flicker. The man stood in shadow, his arms by his sides. She couldn't see his face but she could tell by the way that his shoulders were hunched and his fists were clenched that he was angry with her. Not just angry. Quaking with rage.
For the first time, she looked down at the floor. It was littered with broken champagne glasses, slices and shards and shattered stems. Then she looked down at her feet. At first she thought that she was wearing scarlet socks, but then she realised that her feet were bare, and that the broken glass had cut thin bloody curves into her heels and her soles, and that the top of one of her big toes had been almost completely sliced off, like the top of a boiled egg. She felt chilled with shock. She stood where she was, shaking, and she didn't know what to do.
The man approached her. It was too dark for her to see his face, and besides she didn't want to. 'I bet that you would happily waltz for me, The Blue Danube, barefoot, on broken glass. Look how many glasses I've broken for you, and all of them the finest French crystal.'
He reached out with the finger and thumb of his left hand as if he were going to tilt her chin up, so that she would have to look at him. But as he did so, Effie bit into his finger, hard, and she heard him bellow in pain and devastating fury.
She twisted herself away, and at the same time she felt an extraordinary wrench, like somebody pushing her too quickly through a revolving door. She stumbled, and lifted up her hands to save herself in case she fell, but then she realised that she was still outside the ballroom, in daylight. Pepper was only two or three feet away, bending over to retrieve her hazel twig.
'I-' she started; but she couldn't find the words. She stared into the ballroom with a mixture of fear and astonishment. For one split second, she could understand why people went mad.
'What's the matter?' Pepper asked her. She held her hazel wrapped in a yellow Nepalese scarf, so that she would be insulated from any psychic vibrations.
'I thought that I was... dancing,' Effie breathed.
'You were standing right there,' said Pepper, perplexed.
'No, no, I was right inside the ballroom and it was full of people in evening dress and I was dancing.'
Pepper came up to her and looked her straight in the face, her silver eyes darting from side to side like restless fish, looking for clues, looking for reality. 'You mean it, don't you?' she said. 'You're telling the truth.'
Effie's self-possession began to dissolve, and her eyes were suddenly crowded with tears. 'I just opened the doors, and there I was, right in the centre of the ballroom, dancing with this tall dark man. The whole room was filled with people, I swear it. I could hear them. I could see them. And they were playing The Blue Danube.'
Pepper took hold of her hands. 'Did you see any faces? Did you see who any of these people were?'
Effie, her mouth crumpled in misery, shook her head. 'I thought they looked like animals, dressed up. They made a noise like animals. It was horrible.'
'My God, you're sensitive all right,' said Pepper. 'You're so damned sensitive you don't even need a hazel twig.'
'But it was horrible. It was so horrible. I felt a pain in my feet and I looked down and I didn't have any shoes,on, and I'd been dancing on broken glass. And there was so much blood. And the man said- the man said-'
'Hey, come on, honey,' said Pepper, wiping her eyes for her. 'This wasn't real. None of this was real.'
Effie swallowed. 'He said that he'd made a bet that I would dance for him, dance for him happily, on broken glass.'
Pepper said nothing for a moment, then held her close, shushing her and patting her on the back. After a while, though, Effie pulled away. 'What was it?' she asked. 'How could anything like that happen?'
'I told you. It's a psychic vibration. I felt it, but you actually saw it. You were actually part of it. You must be acutely sensitive, Effie; and whatever vibrations there are in this house, they must be very powerful. I never knew such power.' She leaned cautiously into the open ballroom door, and sniffed. 'Christ, you can even smell it, can't you? That smell like scent, and thunderstorms, all mixed together.'
'What are we going to do? I can't possibly live here if that kind of thing keeps happening to me. I'd go out of my mind.'
'The first thing we can do is go find ourselves a stiff drink,' Pepper suggested. 'After that, I'd better start thinking about a full psychic cleansing - floor by floor, room by room. That's going to be difficult, and it could be very dangerous too.'
'Is that like an exorcism?'
'Unh-hunh. An exorcism is supposed to send demons back to hell, or unquiet spirits off to join their relatives in heaven. But exorcisms don't work because you can't exorcise something that doesn't exist in the first place. Did you ever see a demon? Do you know anybody who ever saw a demon?
'No, a psychic cleansing is totally different because the psychic vibrations come from people who lived right here. You can't send them back anywhere, to heaven or to hell, mainly because there's no such place and also because they belong here, they didn't just live here "yesterday", they live here now, and they're going to be living here tomorrow… the same way you will, too.
'The Bible was right about one thing. People are immortal. They're always being born, they're always growing up, they're always growing old. Time isn't, like, an endless ribbon. It's a series of locations. It's walking from place to place, from street to street.'
'But if these people belong here, how can we get rid of them?'
; Pepper rubbed her eyebrow with the heel of her hand. She was looking tired. 'We don't get rid of them. We just find a way to keep them in their place. Anyway, let's get out of here.'
Effie took one last nervous look into the ballroom, then she started to follow Pepper along the corridor. At once felt sharp, slicing pains in her feet; and she stopped, in horror.
'Pepper!' she called. 'Pepper! My feet!'
She was still wearing her white rope-soled deck-shoes. But the canvas was heavily soaked in dark red blood, and there were spatters of blood on her ankles. She felt ragingly hot, and then cold, and her head felt swimmy. She leaned against the panelling for support, but she was sure that she was going to faint. Pepper came jangling up to her in her beads and her bells and held onto her before she could fall.
'My feet,' she whimpered. 'Oh God, Pepper, my feet.' She kept thinking about her big toe, and how the top of it had been sliced almost completely off.
Pepper said, 'Sit down. Sit right here. I'll go to the car and call for help. Don't try to take your shoes off, whatever you do.'
Effie awkwardly but carefully sat herself down on the floor. 'I'm okay,' she told Pepper. 'I'm okay.'
But when Pepper ran off to call for the paramedics, tears started to roll down her cheeks, and then she sobbed, with clenched fists, until she felt that she was going to break in half. All she could think about was the pain in her feet, and that terrible frightening waltz, and Craig swearing 'Bitch!' at her every time they made love, and his hideous incomprehensible obsession with Valhalla.
Her feet bled inside her shoes, she could feel the wetness welling between her toes. She tilted her head back against the wall and sobbed and sobbed, until at last she stopped, from sheer exhaustion.
It was only when she heard Pepper running back that she realised what she had sounded like, when she was sobbing. She sounded like the woman in the blue-carpeted bedroom, exactly. The same desperation; the same inconsolable sadness. She bit the edge of her hand to stop herself. She was hurt, and she was shocked, but she wasn't going to allow herself to go right over the edge. She wasn't going to be part of whatever was happening, here in Valhalla, this psychic vibration, this haunting.
Pepper hunkered down beside her. 'I called for an ambulance. They won't take too long. They said to keep your shoes on, just for now.'
Effie tried to smile. 'I'm okay. Really, I'm quite okay.'
'I think I made a slight error,' Pepper admitted. 'This is real, isn't it, this psychic vibration? It's actually intruding on us physically.' She held Effie's hand and squeezed it. 'You ought to stay away from Valhalla, Effie. Stay well away. I always thought this house had a bad feeling about it… but, Jesus.'
'Don't worry,' Effie told her. 'I've made up my mind. Craig can buy Valhalla if he wants to, but not with any of my money; and he needn't expect me to live here.'
'Are you serious?' Pepper asked her.
Effie didn't reply, but rested her head back against the wall, and sat there quietly conserving her newly-discovered strength until she heard the whooping of an ambulance siren echoing across the derelict tennis courts.
WEDNESDAY, JUNE 30, 10:18 P.M.
He burst into the room as if demons were after him. 'Effie! Jesus Christ! What happened?'
She was lying on her bed at the Pig Hill Inn reading a slew of glossy magazines which Wendy O'Brien had brought up for her: Vanity Fair and Architectural Digest and Vogue. On the nightstand, there was a half-finished mug of hot chocolate and home-made cookies. Effie had washed her hair and her head was wrapped in a towel turban. Her feet, in their bandages, looked the same. She was very white: waxy-candle white, but she looked - and felt - very composed.
'I told you,' she said, trying to smile. 'I cut my feet on some broken glass.'
He sat down on the edge of the bed. He was gripping a bunch of yellow roses as if they were a weapon. 'What broken glass? Here, at the inn? We could sue them!'
'I went to Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty. There was broken glass in the ballroom.'
'I don't understand. You went to Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty? For why?'
'She's a sensitive, Craig. I wanted to find out what was going on there. I wanted to exorcise it, if I could. Cleanse it. There's something badly wrong with Valhalla, Craig, something really abnormal, believe me.'
'Taking some crackpot like her around it, trying to play exorcists? Come on, Effie. Be serious. These are the 1990's, not the 1790's.'
'Well… I'm not so sure about that. I'm not sure what these are,' said Effie; and managed to look at Craig strongly and steadily. There was a long, oblique pause between them. She knew now that they were no longer partners but combatants.
'So how did you cut your feet?' he asked her. 'Weren't you wearing shoes?'
'Of course I was… in the 1990's.'
'What does that mean?'
'I think it means that I cut them some other time, when I wasn't wearing shoes.'
'Some other time? When? I don't understand.'
'Why are you so impatient with me? Why do you keep trying to suggest that I'm talking nonsense? I cut my feet when I was dancing barefoot in the ballroom, with a man in evening dress. The ballroom was crowded with people; the orchestra was playing The Blue Danube.'
Craig smacked his forehead with the flat of his hand. 'Effie... I don't know what this Pepper Moriarty's been telling you, but I've had it up to here. Steven was murdered. They cut his throat and made him look like a Happy Face. I'm in shock. I'm in grief. I'm mourning here, can you understand that? And you cut your feel because you weren't sensible enough to wear shoes and you blame it on some fantasy. Some goddamned psychic crap.'
'I'm really sorry about Steven. But that doesn't alter what happened. I'm asking you to believe me, Craig. I really need you to believe me.'
He suddenly smiled, shrugged, changed his expression. 'Listen… hey, I didn't mean to come on aggressive. I'm still kind of shaken by Steven, that's all.'
She reached out and held his hand. 'Me too. It doesn't matter how he died; and it doesn't matter that I didn't particularly like him. I still didn't want to see him dead.' She rotated his wedding-band around his finger. 'I just want you to do something for me.'
'Oh, yes?'
'I want you to visit Valhalla with Pepper Moriarty, so that she can show you what it's really like. I want you to experience those psychic vibrations for yourself.'
'With a view to what?'
She pressed his hand tight. 'With a view to not buying it, Craig. I don't want that house, and I don't want you to buy that house.'
'I paid the deposit already. We've agreed a price.'
She was shocked. 'What? When?'
'I called Walter Van Buren from the office. He said that Fulloni & Jahn were prepared to accept two-point-five. I said two or nothing; and they agreed. I mean, what could I do? I called you to discuss it but you weren't here. They're drawing the papers up now.'
'You've agreed to buy Valhalla and you've paid the deposit and you haven't even discussed it with me?' Effie felt as if she had been abruptly immersed in a tub of chilled water.
Craig gave her a boyish pout. 'I had to. Fulloni & Jahn said that, for that price, they had to have an immediate decision. What else could I do?'
'You could have said no,' said Effie, in a high voice, and now she was really quaking.
'I couldn't say no.'
'Why not?' she screamed at him. 'I hate the place! I don't want it! I'm scared of it, and I hate it, and I won't even set one foot in it, ever again!'
She paused for breath, her eyes filled with tears. Spots of blood were beginning to show through the bandages on her feet. 'You've agreed to pay two million dollars for it? Two million dollars is more than everything we own, everything we've ever saved, everything.'
'We can manage,' he said. 'You know we can manage. When the partnership's sold-'
'Who to? Steven can't buy you out - he's dead. How can you sell a law firm that doesn't have any lawyers?'
'We can manage,'
he repeated, doggedly. He was staring at the model on the cover of Vogue as if he could happily kill her. 'I can make plenty of money here and there… you'll see.'
Effie looked at him for a long time and didn't know whether she hated him or whether she felt sorry for him. She cursed those hoodlums who had hit him with a hammer; but it was too late for that; and later than she even knew. 'Let me tell you something, Craig,' she said, 'what's ours is half mine, and you can't touch my half of anything without my permission. Call Walter Van Buren first thing tomorrow, and tell him you made a mistake.'
'Norman's ordered the roof tiles already, and five thousand dollars' worth of joists.'
'Well, tell him to fucking un-order them!' Effie screeched.
Craig recoiled from her, but only slightly. Then he smiled. For Effie, that was the most frightening thing that he could have done, because it meant that no matter how much she protested, he was absolutely convinced that he was going to have his own way.
***
That night, when she was still sleeping, drugged with paracetamol, he dragged up her nightdress, spread her thighs, and pushed himself into her. He woke her up when he started thrusting; but she lay back with her eyes closed, floppy and unresponsive, because she didn't want him to think that she needed him, or that she liked him. She was conscious of every grunt; and when he finally ejaculated she could feel his semen running out of her. But she still feigned sleep. She nearly was asleep: she kept sliding in and out of dreams and unconsciousness and wakefulness and pain. But she didn't want to give him the satisfaction of knowing what she felt; or that he had actually excited her.
She turned over onto her side and listened to him snore. It was strange, but she was sure that he had smelled different. Nothing to do with deodorant, or aftershave. A different body-smell. Slightly oilier, somehow; and a different feel, too. Smoother - and again, oilier.
The House That Jack Built Page 19