House of Fear

by Joe R. Lansdale

  One morning shortly after their wedding day, Emmeline had come to him with her camera and demanded he photograph her in the garden. She had dragged him from his study and across the lawn, and beside the willow she had pulled off her dress and stretched out on the grass.

  Don’t just stand there, Charles! Photograph me.

  Are you sure? he had asked.

  Don’t be so bloody wet! I’ll develop them myself.

  She had rolled onto her back and opened her legs, fingering herself shockingly.

  He wondered if it was then, in those brief minutes beside the willow, that he first discerned the seeds of his wife’s later illness. Perhaps, as he had told himself many times over the years in an attempt to absolve himself from any responsibility, she had been ill even then.

  He closed his eyes and saw her again, lying on her back, her long dark hair smeared across the grass like spilled ink.

  He hurried back to the house.

  The bell chimed, loud in the silence of the old house.

  Tudor hurried across the hallway. He had made an effort, spruced himself up, even bought a new shirt and jacket. He was old enough not to be nervous at the imminent meeting, nor even apprehensive; but he chastised himself for looking ahead, to a time beyond the meeting when he might come to know Caroline a little more. He was old enough to know better, he told himself.

  She was smaller than he recalled, or perhaps it was because she was dwarfed by the dimensions of the gaping porch. She wore a belted fawn mackintosh and a pale blue velvet beret, and her smile was as beautiful as he remembered.

  “I hope the journey here was uneventful?”

  “Entirely. You live in a beautiful part of the world.”

  “I couldn’t live anywhere else.”

  “The perfect environment in which to create.”

  He smiled. That was just what Emmeline had said.

  “Something like that,” he said.

  He took her through to the library, where he had built a fire against the cooling afternoon. He offered her a drink; she said she’d love a coffee. He made two mugs and gave her a short tour of the west wing.

  The conversation flowed: he wondered if the interview had in fact begun, or if the easy exchange of information was just that, communication between two like-minded souls.

  Stop it, he told himself; you must be fifteen years her senior.

  He gave her the history of the house, and she was attentive; then she turned the conversation towards him, asking questions about his life and work.

  They were in what had been the conservatory which, in his parents’ day, had resembled some transplanted section of the Amazon rainforest. Now it was empty, a vast tiled area invaded by shafts of late April sunlight. They stood gazing out across the lawn to the willow.

  He managed to skate over the early years of his writing life, the five years from the age of twenty when he had written his three plays. He told himself that, as a journalist, she would be principally interested in his children’s books, which were, after all, what had made him popular, if not famous.

  Then he wondered if her interest in the children’s books was spurious: was she really here to find out why, so abruptly, he had stopped writing plays?

  If so, she ignored the plays and asked about his children’s output, and he told himself that he was being paranoid.

  They left the conservatory and he found himself pausing before the door to the studio.

  He reached out, amazing himself, and turned the door knob. He was to spend sleepless hours, that night, attempting to analyse his motives for doing what he did then.

  He wondered if he was trying to lay the ghost... though he knew that it could not be that easy.

  “And this is where my wife worked,” he said. “She was the artist Emmeline –”

  “Emmeline Courtenay,” Caroline finished. “Yes, I know of her work.”

  He hesitated on the threshold of the room, almost felled by a slew of unbidden recollections. “I haven’t been in here for years...”

  He stopped. She stepped into the room before him, tactfully pretending she hadn’t heard the catch in his voice.

  He moved to the window and pulled down the sheets. “Emmeline never bothered with curtains,” he said. “All that mattered was light.”

  Now, light flooded the room, dazzling after the imposed twilight of nearly forty years.

  Caroline turned a full circle on the heels of her calf-skin boots. Her mouth was open in what he took to be amazement.

  As he looked around the room, he shared some of that emotion.

  Dozens of brilliant canvases stared at them like windows to other worlds, other times. Most of them portrayed Emmeline, her youthful beauty, her innocence, her joy at the fact of being alive.

  He moved to a canvas of Emmeline disporting herself on the lawn, gloriously naked, beaming up at him... Bull-clipped to the top right corner of the canvas was the faded black and white photograph of the original pose.

  Caroline said, “She was well respected in her field.”

  He nodded, made to reply, but the affirmative caught in his throat. He coughed, then said, “Yes. Yes, she was.”

  “I did a little investigation. She had exhibitions in many of the top galleries.” She fell silent. The air was heavy with the weight of her unasked question: What happened?

  He reached out, touched the accreted oils representing Emmeline’s naked flank. Beneath his fingertips the paint felt like old scar tissue.

  A week after Emmeline’s death, he had entered the studio and arranged her work. He had placed all the early paintings of her naked at the front of the stacks, leaving her more recent work – the portraits he considered a record of her descent into madness – concealed.

  He said, “This is the first time I’ve looked at these in years.”

  She smiled at him. “It must be hard.”

  “Silly. It was nearly forty years ago.”

  They left the studio and he pulled the door shut behind him.

  As they made their way to the library, she said, “And you never felt like selling the place, starting anew, after...”

  He looked at her. What had she been about to say? “To lose this place, that would have been...” He shook his head. “No. No, I could never have done that.”

  “Do you think her ghost haunts the house?” she asked.

  Not this house, he thought. He smiled, sadly. “I sometimes wonder,” he said.

  He persuaded her to have dinner with him that evening at the Three Horseshoes in the village, and, as there was a last train back to London at eleven, she readily agreed.

  He could not recall the last time he had enjoyed a meal, or such company. The conversation was easy; they discovered preferences in common, shared interests. Caroline laughed at his feeble attempts at humour, and he genuinely found her wit infectious.

  She let slip at one point the fact that she was ten years divorced, and his heart flew like a love-sick teenager’s.

  At one point he said, “I hope you don’t mind my saying... but from the very first time I saw you, I thought your face very familiar.”

  She laughed. “I wonder if you’ve caught me on television, Charles.”

  “Television?”

  “I combine journalism with acting. I did a lot of stage work in my early days, but lately I’ve had a few minor TV parts.”

  He smiled. “That must be it. I do admit I watch rather too much television.”

  He accompanied her to the station in a taxi, then saw her aboard the London train. By the time he returned home, staggering in the silvering moonlight, it was midnight and he was drunk.

  He stumbled through the house, laughter alternating with curses, and found himself on the threshold of the studio. He propelled himself through the door, grabbed the closest canvas and tossed it behind him, then moved onto the next one. You bitch, he said to himself; you evil, selfish bitch!

  He stopped, panting, the paintings scattered across the room.

  Th
e canvases behind the nudes stood revealed, and he wondered if this was what he had meant to do all along, to punish himself, to exacerbate his guilt and self-loathing.

  Emmeline’s last work showed a woman who was a tragic ghost of her former youthful self, a wraith tormented by psychological demons. He turned full circle, staring at the revealed portraits; they showed close-ups of her face, horror-stricken, her eyes terrified...

  Staring out at him in accusation.

  The following day, his heart in his mouth, he rang Caroline and suggested, tentatively, that as he was due to come up to London on business in a few days, well... perhaps she would care to meet him?

  “That would be delightful, Charles!”

  After that he saw her two or three times a week for the next month.

  He travelled down to London and she visited him in Suffolk, staying the night in his small, cramped bedroom. After the first night together he opened up his parents’ old room, got a woman in from the village to give it a once over, and he and Caroline slept in the very double bed in which he had been born.

  He told himself that he was happy for the first time in forty years.

  He led her from his study and across the lawn.

  They gravitated towards the willow, as if pulled. It was a blistering summer’s day, and they sought refuge in the pool of shade beneath the tree’s canopy. He pulled Caroline towards him and held her.

  He looked up, to where the trunk separated to form a thick, right-angled bough, old and strong.

  She pulled away from him and stared, shocked. “You’re crying...”

  She wiped the tears from his cheeks and said softly, “Here...?”

  He nodded.

  She led him back across the lawn, into the study, and she held him and said, “I love you, Charles.”

  He looked over her shoulder, back towards the willow, and caught a fleeting glimpse of Emmeline’s ghost, haunting him still.

  A week later, while they were dining at the Three Horseshoes, Caroline said, “Charles, I want to ask you about The House.”

  His mouth suddenly dry, he nodded. “Ask away,” he said, with feigned unconcern.

  She was forking her meal absently, avoiding his eyes.

  After a silence he thought would last for ever, she looked up and said, “Charles, I think it should be performed again.”

  His heart thudded and he felt suddenly dizzy. “You don’t know what you’re saying.”

  “I think I do.” She smiled and reached across the table, taking his hand and squeezing. “Charles, I’m not superstitious.”

  “And nor am I. What happened... what happened had nothing to do with superstition.”

  She held his gaze, said, “Do you really mean to say that the play was cursed?”

  “I don’t know what else might explain what happened.”

  “I do! Coincidence! You’re a rationalist, aren’t you? I’ve read all your books. They aren’t the works of someone who believes in superstition.”

  “Those books,” he said deliberately, “everything I wrote in the years after... after Emmeline died and after what happened subsequently... everything was a frantic attempt to make myself believe in a rational, materialistic universe.”

  She squeezed his hand. “So what do you believe?”

  “I just don’t know,” he said.

  “It was coincidence,” she insisted.

  “That’s what I wanted to believe, want to believe, but...” He took a breath, looked across the table at the woman he realised, then, that he loved very much. “Let me tell you what happened, Caroline.”

  The House was his third play, and his best.

  His first two had been popular and critical successes, and the West End was eager for his next one. It took a year, and was the hardest damned thing he’d ever written. He told himself that that was because it was the truest, the most heart-felt of all his work to date. He’d looked deep into himself, into his relationship with Emmeline – but more, he’d extrapolated from the current state of their relationship and written about how it might be in twenty, thirty years. He’d examined his wife’s personality, her irrationality, and the portrait he’d painted of her had been far from flattering.

  “You see, Caroline, Emmeline wasn’t well, even then. What in the early days I took to be delightful quirks of personality, oddities that marked her out from the crowd, that made her ‘artistic’ or ‘anarchic’... well, I came to realise that they were just the early symptoms of her condition.”

  He stared at his wine, lifted it to his lips and drank.

  “It would be called ‘bi-polar’ now, I suppose. Manic depression. She swung between suicidal lows in which her view of the world was relentlessly bleak, to ecstatic highs when she would think nothing of working twenty hours straight and producing some of her most amazing, life-affirming work.”

  He shrugged, smiled across at Caroline. “As a writer, how could I not write about what was affecting me most?”

  She asked gently, “Why ‘The House’?”

  “I think the house served as a metaphor. Her middle-aged character in the play was obsessed with the house, and it was failing little by little, bit by bit becoming ever more derelict... just as was Emmeline.” He paused, then went on, “She hated the play, of course. Didn’t want it put on.”

  He stopped. He didn’t want to tell anyone, not even Caroline, about his arguments with Emmeline over the play.

  “It opened at the Lyric just a fortnight after Emmeline died,” he said. “And then...”

  She squeezed his hand. “I know what happened. You don’t have to...”

  Just after the curtain fell on the opening night, the actress playing the part of Emmeline had collapsed on the stage and died before the ambulance arrived. Cerebral haemorrhage...

  “There was no understudy, as it was a small theatre company with limited funds. I wanted the play to be taken off, and it was my insistence, along with the delay there would be in a new actress learning the part, that persuaded the backers to cut their losses and drop the play.”

  He looked into her eyes. “So soon after Emmeline’s death, and then the tragedy of... I couldn’t take the grief. I wanted nothing to do with the damned play. It was easier all round if we just pulled it.”

  She said quietly, “But Birmingham rep persuaded you to allow it to be staged a year later.”

  He stared across the bar to the horse-brasses hanging beside the inglenook fireplace. “They did. I should never have listened to them. But I was greedy. I needed the money for the upkeep of the house.”

  He relented, and the play was staged, and an hour after the opening night’s performance, the leading actress was knocked down by a bus outside the theatre and killed instantly.

  Caroline said in a soft voice, “Coincidence, Charles. Coincidence.”

  He stared down at their hands entwined between them. “After that I wanted nothing more to do with the play. My agent sold the rights for a song, but on my insistence he made a stipulation that the play shouldn’t be staged before the end of the century.” He smiled. “I never thought I’d be around long enough for that date to come about.”

  “It’s now 2011,” Caroline said. “Don’t you think that sufficient time has passed to allow it to be staged again?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “It’s successful production would... I think it would help you, Charles. Free you, unleash you from the demons.”

  He smiled, bitterly. “I think you’re being a little melodramatic, Caroline.”

  She held his gaze. “Well,” she said at last, “I do act, after all.”

  A combination of facts tumbled in his mind, and something clicked. He said, “You want to stage the play?”

  “My ex-husband was the producer who bought the rights of The House from your agent. He thinks the time has come to stage it again. He’s assembled a company and it’s now in rehearsal at the Metro.”

  He stared at her. “And?” he asked.

  “And the ag
reement he and I had, back then, was that if ever he did restage the play, then I should play the part of Emmeline. He contacted me a while ago, honouring that agreement.”

  He felt suddenly frozen as he stared across the table at her. “You... you had this planned all along, didn’t you?”

  “Charles...” she began. “I admit, when I first approached you, I wanted to get your permission to have the play performed. And then I got to know you.” She stopped, reached across the table and gripped his hand. “What we have together now, Charles, I value so much.”

  “I don’t know whether to believe you, or feel betrayed.”

  She smiled. “I hope you will believe me, Charles, but I’ll also understand if you feel a sense of betrayal. But I assure you, none is meant.”

  His heartbeat seemed to fill the room. He said, “I can’t let you do it.”

  “Charles, I want to prove to you that the deaths were nothing more than coincidence. I want to help you. I don’t believe in mediaeval superstition. The only way to banish this belief is to stage the play.”

  He felt desperation surge within him. “Caroline, I beg you. You don’t know what you’re saying. Two deaths... I don’t want a third on my conscience. You didn’t know Emmeline, her strength of character. She...” He shook his head, knowing full well that he was sounding irrational. “She was insane, and she...”

  She stared at him. “What? She cursed the play? Charles, that’s nonsense!”

  “I beg you, Caroline. At least think about it.”

  “Do you think I haven’t given it a lot of thought already?” She was gathering her things together. “I must go. There’s a train at ten.”

  “Stay the night!” he pleaded.

  She touched his hand. “I must go. I have rehearsals in the morning.”

  “Caroline, I love you...”

  That stopped her. Standing, she reached out and touched his cheek. “And believe me, I love you, too, Charles, which is why I’m doing this.” She paused, then said, “The play opens a fortnight tonight. I’ll be in touch immediately after the curtain. Trust me.”