Craig paced around the magic circle. He was wearing a black turtle-neck and black slacks and shiny black shoes. His eyes looked puffy, as if he hadn't been sleeping well.
'There are no vehicles here because Norman drove me up here, and he's gone over to Carmel to order some more coving. I have to say that I'm not too happy about people just wandering in here without asking me,' he said. 'We've already had one fatal accident; we don't want any more.'
'I'm sorry,' said Pepper. 'I guess I should have asked. I'm only doing this for Effie's sake.'
'Doing what? Conjuring up ghosts?'
'Mr. Bellman, I don't believe in ghosts, you know that. But the psychic atmosphere here is very threatening. If I can cleanse it, I'm sure that Effie will be very much happier about coming to live here.'
'Oh, you're sure, are you? Well, may I ask what gives you the right to poke your nose into my affairs? How would you like it if I went around to that crackpot store of yours and fumigated it because I didn't like the smell of crushed spiders or dried dogshit or whatever it is you put in those potions of yours? You'd be angry, wouldn't you?'
Pepper bit her lip. 'I guess I would, Mr. Bellman. But that doesn't really give you the right to be so offensive.'
'You think I'm being offensive? I'm very sorry, I apologise. Next time that you try to come in here with your mumbo-jumbo I'll throw you out without a word.'
Pepper hunkered down and began to blow out her candles and collect up her crosses and her potions. 'I've said I'm sorry. I didn't mean to poke my nose in. I was thinking of Effie, that's all; and I was thinking of you, too.' She stood up. 'Whatever you say to me now, Mr. Bellman, you won't be happy here at Valhalla until you've cleansed it from top to bottom.'
He reached out and gripped her left wrist, so that she dropped the hazel. He looked directly into her eyes.
'I'm happy here already,' he said. 'This house is me. This house is what I am.'
'Please, let go of me, Mr. Bellman.'
But he kept on gripping her wrist until it hurt. 'You know something, you have very special eyes. I never saw eyes like yours before. What colour would you say they were?'
'Please, you're hurting me.'
Craig paused for a moment, and then released her. 'Maybe I was wrong about you. Maybe you should cleanse the house, after all. Do you want to try?'
'I think I'll call it a day,' said Pepper. 'If there were any psychic vibrations, they'll have taken a powder by now. They don't react well to boorish behaviour.'
'You're angry with me now,' Craig grinned. On the floor, only two or three inches away from his left foot, the hazel was still twitching and rearing, as if it were a skeletal hand that was trying to take a grip on his ankle. Pepper glanced down at it, and then back at him.
'I'm not angry with you, just disappointed. You're so darned... testy.'
'Testy? And that surprises you? I was a high-flying international lawyer who had his career cut short by a stupid taxi driver and a bunch of geeks. I thought I was one of the glittering few. I thought I was invulnerable. I feel cheated. I feel frustrated. I feel furious, too. You're disappointed? I have an anger inside of me you could never understand. I never expected life to be fair but I didn't expect it to be vindictive.'
'So, life didn't turn out the way you expected. You feel pissed. But why take it out on Effie?'
'What do you mean? I'm not taking it out on Effie! We haven't had such a good time in years!'
'She doesn't like the house, Mr. Bellman. She hates it.'
'Unh-hunh.' He wagged his finger at her. 'At first she hated it, I'll grant you that, but not now. She's beginning to like it now. Last night she told me that it was really starting to grow on her.'
'She's only saying that because she doesn't want to wreck your marriage.'
'Wreck our marriage? Are you crazy? We're closer than ever. We talk together, we go places together, our sex life's terrific. Okay, I'm very far from being perfect. But our marriage is helping me to convalesce. Just like this place. I love it. It gives me strength. It gives me actual, physical strength.'
'Effie thinks it's frightening. That's why I offered to cleanse it.'
Craig kept on circling around and around her, outside the circle of unlit candles. 'And if you do manage to cleanse it?'
'Then you may still experience some psychic vibrations, but there won't be any noises or visions or anything like that. You probably won't feel anything more than a faint disturbance in the air.'
Craig said, 'You remind me of somebody. It's your cheekbones. Maybe your mouth, too. You remind me of... no, I can't remember.' He turned around, so that he was standing with his back to her, and he didn't say any more.
'I'll be going now,' Pepper told him.
'Why don't you stay?' His tone sounded different now, much colder and much more controlled.
'I thought I was poking my nose in. I thought you didn't want me here.'
'You came to cleanse, why don't you cleanse?'
'I'm not sure that I can do it while you're here. You're very vibrant. Psychically speaking, of course. You're not sensitive, not like Effie. But you're definitely vibrant. I'm trying to pick up other emotions, but all I can pick up is you.'
'Then maybe you should start with me.' He turned back and his eyes were even blacker than before.
Pepper lifted her head and listened. She could still hear the jazz playing in another room. 'Are you having a party?' she asked him.
Craig listened too. Then he said, 'I don't hear anything.'
'Jazz, I thought it was.'
'Jazz?'
Pepper picked up her hazel twig. It was still quivering; and there wasn't any question that it was bending its branches towards Craig. She pointed it directly at him, while he watched her with a small, amused smile on his face. She slowly paced around him, and wherever she went, it kept on bending itself in his direction.
'This is very unusual,' she said. 'Most of the time, when there's a strong psychic vibration, the hazel shies away. I never saw it showing such attraction for anything before.'
'I guess I must be a very attractive guy.'
She stepped a little closer to him, and now the hazel began literally to writhe, like octopus tentacles. All the time, Craig kept his eyes on her, unwavering, with the same small smile.
'What do you think?' he asked her.
'You're right,' she said. 'It is you. Or at least, it's using you. The house itself is filled with psychic disturbance; but you are the point of focus. It's like the house is a camera full of psychically-sensitive film, and you're acting as the lens.'
'You mean Effie's been seeing things because of me? Half of the time I wasn't even there!'
'You wouldn't have to be there. You started something the moment you stepped into this house, you really did. You triggered it off. I don't know how, but we can try to find out, and I'm pretty sure that we can cleanse it.'
Craig looked down at her array of magical accoutrements. 'How do you normally cleanse things? Eye of newt and leg of toad, and then abracadabra?'
'As a matter of fact I was going to use mirrors. You reflect the image of the room in which the psychic disturbance is taking place from one mirror to another, through thirteen mirrors, until the image of the room is so dim that you can hardly see it. If that sounds like superstition, actually it's quite scientific. It's like Einstein - if you slow down the time it takes for you to see something, you slow it down in real time, too. Right here, we need to separate what's happening yesterday from what's happening today, and to do that we only need to lose the teentsiest fraction of a second. That's all.'
'What about a man? How do you go about cleansing a man?'
'It's pretty much the same. He has to be reflected in thirteen mirrors.'
'Do you think I need cleansing?' His voice was lower now, and slower. She took one step back but he took one step forward.
'I don't know. I'd have to do some more research. I never came across a situation like this before.'
She st
epped back again, and again he stepped forward.
'Ms. Moriarty,' he said, 'you know how I feel about this house. I want to live here and I want Effie to live here with me. Happily, and because she really wants to. If there's something about me that causes these - disturbances, whatever - don't you think you owe it to Effie to stop me doing it?'
He laid his hand on her shoulder. For some reason Pepper found it a most disturbing gesture, as intimate as if he had laid his hand on her breast. Up until now, she had only seen Craig as Effie's bossy, overbearing husband, a big man with the kind of bluff good looks that she had always found far too bluff and far too good. She preferred darker men, men with quirky faces and suggestive smiles. Gypsylike men, who rarely shaved. But suddenly she sensed that same kind of darkness in Craig: that same kind of danger.
She suddenly thought: this man's sexy, and he wants me.
'I never did this before. It might not work. It might be dangerous.'
'You weren't afraid to cleanse the house. Why should you be afraid to cleanse me?'
She stared at him and he looked different. She said, 'We'll have to have mirrors. Full-length mirrors.'
'We have plenty of mirrors in the anteroom upstairs. Why don't you do it up there?'
She took hold of his wrist and lifted his hand from her shoulder. Again, there was an intimacy about touching him that was quite out of proportion to what she had actually done. She had only held his wrist: and she had felt his skin and his wristbones and the dark hairs on the back of his hand. She had even felt his pulse.
'I don't think I'm experienced enough for this.' She was increasingly conscious of her nakedness, and the thinness of her dress's fabric.
'You can try, can't you? Maybe you can solve all of our problems.'
'Well, I-'
'Please.'
She gathered up her candles and her jars while he stood and watched her. Occasionally she glanced up at him, and he gave her a little nod of encouragement. He made no effort to help, even when she had to carry her heavy tapestry bag across the ballroom and out to the hallway.
The windows along the corridor had all been replaced, and they were hung with dark blue velveteen curtains. The floor had been cleaned and polished, and the oak panelling had been taken back to its original honey beige.
He saw her taking it all in. 'There's still a long way to go. But not many men can build the house of their dreams, can they?'
Pepper nodded. 'You have to think of Effie, though. You have to consider your wife. She's your wife.'
'Oh, I think of my wife all right. And my wife thinks of me. My wife would do anything for me.'
They started to climb the stairs under the coat-of-arms that said Non omnis moriar, I shall never completely die.
Craig said, 'If I asked her to, she'd cut her wrists for me. She'd dance barefoot on broken glass.'
Pepper stopped, halfway up the stairs. Her bag was heavy and her hands were beginning to tremble. 'Would you ask her to?'
'It depends. Asking a woman to prove her devotion is one of the last great masculine prerogatives. You love me? Go on, my darling, cut off all your hair! You love me? Have yourself tattooed with roses all over your breasts! You love me? Walk round the house naked in front of my friends! Show me how much you love me! Prove it! Do whatever I tell you! Crawl through mud on your hands and knees, and then get up and kiss me and thank me for making you dirty!'
Pepper's mouth was dry. 'You don't ask Effie to do things like that, though, do you?'
He continued upstairs, and then pushed open the doors to the anteroom. Inside, the room had been spectacularly refurbished. She couldn't believe how quickly it had been done - and why hadn't Norman told her about it, brought her here to see it? A huge chandelier sparkled from the ceiling, and all the gilt-framed mirrors had been immaculately restored. Even the thick red carpets had been relaid, and the room refurnished with three gilded ottomans with fat red cushions, occasional tables and gilt-painted chairs.
Pepper put down her bag, still looking around her in amazement. Craig closed the doors. He crossed the room with a gliding walk, and a dozen more of him crossed the room, too, in their different mirrors. 'I have to applaud your mirror theory,' he smiled. 'Sometimes I walk into this room and I don't know whether the same "me" is going to walk out at the other end. Why should this "me" be any more valid than any of those other "mes"?' He turned towards the right-hand mirrors and seven of him turned left.
Pepper looked around, unsettled. All that Norman had told her this afternoon was that Fulloni & Jahn had let them start basic roof-repair work before the final sale went through, so that Valhalla wouldn't deteriorate any further. But he hadn't said anything about mirrors and carpets and curtains and lavishly-gilded antique furniture.
'You see these carvings?' said Craig, approaching the solid oak doors that led into the master bedroom. 'They tell it all, the whole story. Women should be silent, and obedient, and keep their eyes closed except when told to open them. Men should turn their backs to them, and show them nothing at all. The first woman was made from dirt and women have been dirt ever since.'
He turned around, and stared at Pepper, and laughed out loud. She didn't know whether he was being serious or not. 'That's the story. That's what these doors have been carved to represent. Eve wasn't the first woman: Lilith was. God agreed to make her, because Adam was so lonely. He fashioned her out of dirt, the clay that men walk on, and she was never more than dirt. But soon she wanted to be equal to Adam. She didn't want to obey him, she didn't want to work as his servant; so she left him and she was turned out of the Garden of Eden.
'You can't say that God didn't give her a chance. He sent three angels after her, to try to persuade her to come back.' Craig traced the names that were carved on the banners with the tip of his finger. Samsi, Sangavi, Semangelaf. 'These are the names of the three angels. They offered Lilith everything, as long as she agreed to serve Adam and all the sons of Adam; but she refused, and so God put a curse on her that made a hundred of her children die every day. Because of that, Lilith hides herself in every marriage bed, hoping to catch drops of semen so that she can have more children. Because of that, parents sing their children a song of love every night before they go to sleep, and call it a lullabye, which means nothing more nor less than "Lilla-bi!" - "Lilith, be gone!" '
Pepper came up to the doors and stood beside him. The carved faces looked so real that she reached out and touched them to make sure that they weren't. 'How do you know all this?' she asked.
He touched the same face that she was touching, drawing his fingertips across the lips as if he expected them to kiss him. He wouldn't stop smiling. She sensed that alluring darkness even more strongly. It slid beneath his shallow, self-satisfied exterior like a shark sliding almost invisibly beneath the faintly-ruffled surface of a shallow bay.
This man's not only sexy; he's dangerous.
What disturbed her even more was the ambiguity of her own feelings. She began to think that it was wrong, calling herself Pepper. She didn't feel like a Pepper at all. She didn't completely understand who she was, or what she was doing here. And her perceptions had subtly changed. Everything around her seemed to be magnified, and almost painfully clear. She could see every detail of the wood-carvings, every whorl and chisel mark in the oak. She could see Craig's face as if she were looking at it through a crystal-clear drop of water.
Yet his voice seemed indistinct. His words came out in a long, low grumble.
'I've made it my business to know it,' Craig told her. He turned away from the door and took hold of her arm. 'If you want anything in this life, you have to do your research. I was five months in Palestine, and three months in Egypt, and at the end of that time I knew what I was going to do. I built Valhalla, in my own image, and I prepared to show God that women are just what Lilith was.'
Pepper said, 'Mr. Bellman… you didn't build Valhalla. You only bought it.'
He seemed not to hear. Instead he walked across to a cocktail cabi
net and flung open the doors, almost as if he expected to find the Holy Grail inside.
'Drink?' he asked her. 'I make a mean champagne cocktail.'
'I don't think so. I think I'd better be getting back.'
He poured himself a whisky. 'Back? Back to where?'
'Back to-' Pepper began, and then suddenly realised that she couldn't remember where she was supposed to go back to. In fact, she couldn't think why she had imagined that she was supposed to go back anywhere. 'Well, anyway, I don't think so. I don't drink before midnight.'
He came across to her, circling the whisky in his glass. 'If I asked you to tattoo roses on your breasts, would you do it for me?'
'What do you want, a woman or a garden?'
His eyes were dead; but he was still smiling. 'There's no difference. Both are transient beauty, fashioned out of dirt.'
'Less of the dirt if you don't mind. I'll have a cigarette.' He went back to the cocktail cabinet and returned with a silver art-deco cigarette box, filled with Sobranie Black Russian cigarettes. Pepper took one and he lit it for her. She hadn't smoked a Black Russian for as long as she could remember, and the pungent smell of Balkan tobacco took her back to the days when she... the days when she what… She just couldn't seem to remember.
Craig sat on one of the sofas, and patted the cushion next to him to indicate that Pepper should sit down, too. 'No,' she said. 'I really have to go.'
'I thought you were staying over.'
'I don't know. I'm confused.'
'I heard that Gordon bought you an apartment in London. Is that true?'
'Well, you know how much Gordon likes to throw his money around.' Then she thought: Gordon? Who in the hell is Gordon? I don't know any Gordon. But then she thought: Of course I do. Gordon, with his pearl stickpin and his smart maroon cravat and his grey sweptback hair… I met him at Deauville last year.
'You should be careful of Gordon,' said Craig. 'He's into the store for f 55,000 already.'
'Why should I be careful? It's not my money!'
'Just don't rely on him too much, that's all I'm saying.'
The House That Jack Built Page 22