House of Echoes: A Novel

by Brendan Duffy

  Ben wanted to press the pedal to the floor, but he controlled himself. He forced himself to focus on the icy road. He didn’t know what Jake meant when he told him that he had to hurry, but it didn’t matter, because he intended to.

  He and Bub were the only ones on the road. No one ever had any reason to go to Swannhaven except for the people who lived there. And Ben thought that most of them were probably as happy as a bear in a cave, because the storm had finished what geography had begun. For a while, no one would intrude upon them in their valley.

  Fallen trees had closed a number of streets in North Hampstead, including their main street. Ben had to carry Bub three blocks to the pediatrician’s home. The baby had finally fallen into a restless sleep, but Ben did not know if that was a good thing or not.

  Despite the freezing conditions, many people were outside. Some worked to shovel their sidewalks and others walked around in their snow gear, taking in the strange beauty that had descended upon them. Neighbors waved to one another across the street and gathered around broken trees, shaking their heads and looking to the sky. Children tried to sled down their meager hills, and others waged snowball fights that spanned lawns.

  Stuck in Swannhaven’s strange little world, it was easy to forget what life could be like. Being among these happy people in their unhaunted town, Ben tried to remember.

  48

  Charlie watched the window as Mom counted underwear across the hall. She seemed better than when she’d been fighting the house. Dad seemed better, too, but still things did not feel right. A knot of something hard and cold hurt Charlie inside his chest.

  He understood why Dad had gone away with Bub, but Charlie did not think Dad should have left Mom and him here. When he thought about it, he felt the knot tighten.

  The man was still in the woods. But it wasn’t the man that Charlie was afraid of.

  The others were in the kitchen and in the living room. More came in cars from the village. They were dark specks pulling up the long white slope of the gravel drive.

  Charlie thought about going downstairs to see what they wanted. But he was afraid. When the chief had spoken to him, there was something in his eyes that Charlie hadn’t understood. But he knew that Hickory Heck would not have been so afraid.

  He crept down one of the back staircases. He heard voices in the rooms. Some he recognized, but not all.

  Someone was in the bathroom in the hall. The door wasn’t closed all the way, and Charlie looked through the opening.

  It was Jake. He was at the sink, washing his face. Blood flowed through his fingers. Charlie thought of the deer he’d seen the man kill. He thought of the way the knife had slipped into its neck and how its fur was lost under a sheet of crimson. Jake’s face was not as bad. His eye was bruised and there was a cut on his forehead. His lip was swollen. Red splotches stained his undershirt.

  Charlie leaned against the door to get a better view of Jake, and Jake saw the door move. Their eyes met in the reflection of the mirror. It was strange: They looked each other in the eye, but they weren’t looking at each other at all. Jake turned away and mopped his face with a towel. The towel came away stained pink. Then he glanced back at Charlie in the mirror.

  He mouthed a word. Charlie stared at his swollen lips. He thought of the way the deer’s tongue had flicked against its teeth when it died. When Jake mouthed the word again, Charlie left him and made for the stairs.

  He wore only socks, and he knew that the others in the rooms wouldn’t hear him.

  Now he knew what he had to do. He knew where he had to go.

  Mom was in Bub’s room. She was still packing, but there was no time for that now. Charlie wondered if he could make her understand. He did not know if he understood himself. What he did understand was that the man had been right from the beginning. They should not have come here. They should not have waited so long to leave.

  Charlie knew he would convince Mom, because he had to.

  He thought of what he should say to her, but all he could think of was that one word. The man had said it to him, and now so had Jake. More than that, he knew it was the truth. It screamed through his mind and flowed to every part of his body.

  Run.

  49

  It was nearly dark by the time Ben returned to the barricades at the south pass. Crimson clouds seared the sky like a wound.

  He’d left the pediatrician’s with antibiotics, eye drops, and a list of instructions. It was painful for Ben to see Bub in such discomfort, but the doctor had given him medicine, cleaned out his eyes, flushed out his nose, and had not seemed as worried as Ben had been. Still, a pit of foreboding remained in his chest. He knew he wouldn’t feel right until he got his family out of Swannhaven.

  From a rise just beyond the pass, he saw that the village was dark and quiet. Though the valley was already cast in shadow by the western mountains, Ben could not see even a glimmer of light from the isolated farmhouses. He wondered if this was how the village had looked when the Iroquois attacked it centuries ago. On a night like tonight, it felt as if little had changed here since that long-ago winter.

  The icy snow gleamed in the fading light. The frosted limbs of the tallest trees caught the last flames of sunset. It was almost beautiful.

  The Crofts was dark when Ben reached it. There were a dozen cars parked along the drive behind Caroline’s Escape, but not a window was lit. Outside, the air was brutally cold. It burned Ben’s cheeks and hands as he pulled Bub from his car seat.

  It was little warmer in the kitchen. He tried the light switch; it gave him nothing but a hollow click. They kept a flashlight in one of the drawers, and Ben tripped over something as he went to look for it. The thing on the floor was heavy and immobile, and it sent a jolt through his leg when he knocked into it. He dug through the drawer but was unable to find anything more useful than a matchbook. Through the flare of a match, he found a candle to light and used its glow to survey the kitchen.

  The kitchen table held several mugs of half-drunk coffee. Ben felt the mugs, but they were as frigid as the air. He could not guess how long ago the Crofts had lost power. Without heat, the house would have quickly succumbed to the terrible cold. Clouds burst from his mouth with every breath, shining like nebulae in the flicker of the candle. Ben wondered if the entire village had lost its electricity. It would not have taken more than a single ice-laden tree collapsing against the lines for the valley to revert to a time of darkness.

  Bub was still asleep in his arms. The cold was no good for the baby, but Ben didn’t plan to linger.

  The chairs around the kitchen table had been pushed away, as if their occupants had left in a hurry. Ben had expected Caroline and Charlie to be waiting for him in the kitchen, but losing power might have slowed their packing. This is what Ben told himself. There was no sign of the villagers. They might still be searching the forest for JoJo, though Ben did not know what luck they could expect in the dark.

  As he headed to the staircase, he noticed what he had tripped over. It was a thick coil of iron chain. Its links were rough and hand-hewn, each the size of Ben’s fist. It caught the candle light dully across its timeworn shine. Red blooms of rust flecked its surface.

  Even if he hadn’t had a sleeping child in his arms, Ben would not have called out for Caroline and Charlie. There was something about the cold quiet of the house that demanded silence. This feeling became even more pronounced as he walked the halls and stairs and peered into the chasm of the Crofts. Without the hum of the furnace, the house was as still as a grave. With his own footsteps as the only sound, it was as if the Crofts itself were holding its breath.

  Caroline and Charlie were not upstairs. Ben checked all the bedrooms and found nothing more than half-packed suitcases. Fear fluttered in his chest. He called Caroline’s phone and heard a chirp from across the room. Her phone lay on the floor by their bed.

  He held Bub close. He did not know what to do.

  The tightness in his chest told him that nothing was mo
re important than finding them, and the pounding in his heart came from the fact that he had no idea how to do that.

  Charlie had told him that they should leave, but Ben hadn’t listened. And now they were gone.

  Even if they were somewhere in the house, it would take him forever to search the place room by room. He wanted to scream into the emptiness of the Crofts, but he didn’t. If Caroline and Charlie had left the house, it had been for a reason. If they were hiding, then there must be something here that they were hiding from.

  Ben’s gaze wandered to a window. In its frozen valley, the village was so dark that it might have vanished. The snow was stone gray in the light of the moon and the color of sapphires where the trees cast their shadows. The wind kicked up loose snow as it ravaged the fields, glazing them in an icy mist.

  The ceiling above him creaked.

  He froze and turned his eyes slowly upward. With the horrors dancing through his brain, Ben prepared himself for anything. He half-expected to see some abyssal creature poised on the ceiling, peering through lidless eyes at him. But there was nothing other than an inert chandelier and the shadow of his own hand warming itself over the candle’s fire. Then there was another creak.

  Slow footsteps made their way across the floor above him.

  Ben headed for the stairs. Anything could be waiting for him on the third floor, but he chose to believe that it was his missing wife and son.

  It would be interesting, he thought, to write all this down one day. Perhaps then he would see where the facts and his fantasy parted ways. He’d heard it said that the difference between fiction and nonfiction was that fiction had to make sense. It would be satisfying to impose order on the series of unfathomable events his life had become.

  He opened the door into the drafty expanse of the third floor and came upon a tall, solitary figure bundled against the cold.

  “Oh!” said Roger Armfield. “Ben, hello! You startled me.” His voice was muffled by the scarf he wore around his face. He stood in the puddle of illumination left by his flashlight. All Ben could see of his face were his eyes, which darted in their sockets.

  “Where are my wife and son?” Ben asked.

  “That’s why I’m here,” Armfield said. “I’m looking for them.”

  “Why? Why are you in my house?” Ben didn’t remember the hapless veterinarian helping with any of the searches for Bub.

  “The chief asked a bunch of us up here to help search the forest for JoJo Tanner,” Armfield said. He paused, expecting Ben to say something, then continued when he didn’t. “Then your wife and Charlie went missing. We don’t know where they are. The chief is searching the forest, but I thought I’d have a look around here.”

  “Why would they be hiding?” Ben asked.

  “Hiding? Oh, I wouldn’t say they’re hiding. We know your wife hasn’t been well; maybe she got confused.” There was something different about the vet. His words had often tripped over themselves, but now there was a kind of mania to them.

  “Confused,” Ben repeated.

  “We want the best for them. It’s just that sometimes what seems like the right thing isn’t the right thing. Do you know what I mean?” Armfield pulled off his scarf. Under its striped wool, his face was gaunt and unshaven.

  “No.”

  “That’s why we need to find him,” Armfield said. “We have to do the right thing. Even if it seems hard. Especially if it seems hard. If it weren’t hard, then it wouldn’t count for anything.”

  “Where’s everyone else?” Ben growled. “All we want to do is get out of here.”

  “I know, I know,” Armfield said. “And I’m sorry, I am. It must be so confusing. But I know someone who can help.” He stepped past Ben and started down the stairs. “Come on,” he said.

  Ben followed him down to the first floor. Before they reached the library, he saw the orange flicker of a fire dance across the hallway ceiling.

  Lisbeth was staring out the window at the blank fields. When she turned to him, the flames from the fireplace threw into relief the hollows of her face.

  “I need to find my family, Lisbeth,” Ben said.

  “We all do, Ben. This won’t take long, and that’s God’s truth. To tell it right might take longer, but the time for that has passed, and I’m sorry for that.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Have you ever tried to tell a story to a child and had to leave out the ugliest parts of it?” she asked him. “But when you make it easier to swallow—to protect their precious ears—the story just doesn’t quite mean as much. Sometimes the savage parts and the important parts are the same. You can see that, can’t you?”

  “What are you talking about?” Ben asked.

  “Your questions, Ben,” Lisbeth said. “You must have them, sure as I have the answers to them, even if it’d be an easier thing not to have to hear them.”

  She pulled a sheath of handwritten pages out of her jacket. They were protected in a plastic folder, but Ben could still see that they were written in the hand of a woman who’d been taught penmanship with a flourish. He recognized the dates at the top of each letter and the signature at the bottom. Ben remembered that Lisbeth had told him that she was named after Elizabeth Swann.

  December 21, 1777

  Dear Kathy,

  At last we have found salvation, Kathy.

  Father has told us again of the Coptic saints, who sustained themselves in fierce deserts by faith alone. Through the purity gained from that sacrifice, they achieved true communion with the Lord. These ancient saints could not eat less than we do, and I cannot conceive of a place less fit for man than these frozen mountains. It is no wonder that the Lord in His wisdom has acted through us, as well.

  Mother and Father have heard him, and so have many of the others. I, too, have heard voices in the night, but I confess that I cannot discern the words, though I try so hard to.

  James has been bound to the elder tree. He alone of us has persisted in bodily strength, and so God has set him apart from the rest. It is wondrous to behold God’s work in this, Kathy. Skin peels from the rest of us in sheets, and hair falls aside in clumps, but James is at his most handsome. They have bound him with chains to the elder tree. No less was demanded of Abraham when he was commanded to deliver unto the Lord his only son.

  I hear him call to me from the cold, and his cries cut me like a blade. This is as it should be, for if we did not suffer, then our sacrifice would count for naught. We cut out the best part of ourselves to demonstrate our faith. Our strength comes from our suffering.

  I look at my calendar, and I cannot credit that a mere ten weeks have passed since the attack. Everything about that old world is gone. It is a dream brought to waking. Gone is our country, gone is our village, gone is our beloved Jack, and gone are so many of our dear friends. How else to explain our sudden misfortune than by the intervention of the beast? But now the Lord had returned to show us to salvation.

  Though we are proud to fight as his soldiers, it was a folly for our ancestors to come to this place, Kathy. It was arrogance that led us into this winter. I have read Grandfather’s journals. How blessed he must have counted himself to believe that we alone in all of history are a people untethered by the past. That we are creatures of splendor, forging a new country in a new world. How wrong he was.

  We shall remember James always. Faith and memory are what shall ever keep this valley from the beast’s grasp.

  You cannot fully understand what has transpired here, Kathy. It is a thing not seen since the time of Christ Himself. That is how important our part is. Does that sound like blasphemy to you, sister? Perhaps it is, but, then, what wisdom did not first begin as such blasphemy? As hard as our lot is, we between the mountains cannot tread wrong in His service. Not where demons desecrate His land, and much-loved children are laid out in offering.

  Have faith, Kathy. Only the strongest can keep up the light in a world that has become so dark.

  Your Bess />
  50

  Spare me your horrified looks, Ben. Truth is, we in this valley might well be the last people in all the world who haven’t lost our minds. Think on what greeted the first Christians when they delivered the word to the heathen lands: ridicule, torture, and death. So save your smart talk. Do not pretend that this hasn’t happened before.

  We’ve told you of the Winter Siege. The hunger and the cold. What the Iroquois didn’t take, the demon in the woods tried to make its own. The Iroquois called it a wendigo: a starving man in thrall to a spirit with a hunger so great it cannot be slaked. The Indians worship false gods, but their demons are as real as ours. What can’t you believe? If your twenty-first-century mind needs a twenty-first-century answer, imagine it as an Indian brought to madness by unspeakable hunger. Your kind wraps the old illnesses with words long enough to disguise the fact that you know nothing about the darkness that can grow in the human heart. Whether the man was ill or possessed by a creature from the abyss or taken by the very shade of Lucifer himself changes nothing.

  What matters is that the beast tried our faith that winter as he once tested Job’s. And our faith did not fail. God tested our obedience as he once tested Abraham’s. And our obedience did not falter.

  Our ancestors made terrible sacrifices because that was what was demanded of them. God’s will be done. Remember that this life is fleeting. The pain suffered here? The barest of shadows on the face of eternal salvation. How do I know? Because God accepted their sacrifice.

  James Swann was given unto the Lord on the winter solstice, a thumb in the eye of the beast who so thrives during winter’s darkest days. The thaw began no later than the next day. The winds died down, and the forest became silent for the first time in memory. A holy calm spread across the valley. From the Crofts, the men spied deer on the Drop. Our people ate well that night for first time in many weeks.