by Thomas Cater
Generations of clinging vines had worked their way into and through the mortar and died. Birds, which had once nested among the vines, had abandoned them and left it looking like a vacant slum.
It was an incredible house, a monument to its builder, but it would take money to restore the outside to the splendor it had known. The disreputable hovels however surrounding the land on both sides of the road would continue to diminish its value. It was a bargain and it would be foolish to ignore.
I heard a door slam, which I thought was peculiar under the circumstances. The sound sent a chill rattling up the back of my neck. It was as if whoever occupied the house were announcing my arrival. A foolish notion, but the house did seem to awaken. Myra believed I had a rare gift for waking sleeping houses that were better off if they were not disturbed.
The trees began to stir anxiously and the air became cool with a blend of unpleasant odors, especially those emanating from houses that stood empty too long. The sun vanished behind a cloud passing above that primeval wilderness. My purpose, I decided would be better served if I returned tomorrow. The sun’s rays would more easily penetrate the shadows and overhanging leaves around the house.
As I prepared to leave, I saw something from the corner of my eye. I turned and faced a serpent dangling from a limb. For a moment, I thought I was once again in Cambodia. We gazed at each other, its forked tongue savoring currents in the air. My fear, I knew, was filling its olfactories with a tantalizing fragrance. Sweat had begun to seep from my pores and my fingers tightened around the machete.
The serpent’s head swayed to the left. I swung the knife quickly with one smooth stroke. The head separated from the body and fell to the ground. Blood was glistening on the knife, but the decapitated head vanished in the tall grass. Its scaly patchwork body still dangled from the tree, but turned quickly into a fungus-laden branch.
My adrenals continued to infuse my body with alacrity. I bolted abruptly from the house. I felt a sting on the lobe of my ear. I ran through the tall weeds and brush waving the machete over my head, segmenting leafy limbs and vines. I hit the narrow deer path in a smooth stride and exploded through the brush.
It felt good to run and leave doubt and anxiety behind. I had lots of practice running from things: angry women, jobs I detested, responsibilities of all kinds. I could on occasion sense the presence of things with a desire to restrain or change me.
I signaled Virgil with a whistle. He made several inept movements, as if he were looking for some place to hide. He pulled the .45 clumsily from his jacket pocket and pointed it in the air. After a moment of indecision, he climbed back into the car and fired up the engine. I vaulted, with the help of one arm, and swung both legs over the wall.
“What’s wrong? Why are you running?”
His heart, I knew, was beating faster than mine was. There was a note of panic in his voice and his eyes were wild. I breathed deeply and laughed outrageously; the kind of laughter that comes when one is too confused to do anything else.
“It’s a fantastic house!” I cried out, feeling inside the distinct pleasure of cheating fate.
“Did you go inside?” He asked.
“No, but I killed a snake.” I showed him the blade of the knife, but the blood was gone, wiped clean by the limbs and vines I had hacked to pieces while making my escape.
“What did you see” Virgil asked, unable to restrain his curiosity.
“I don’t know,” I said, “But I think I saw a snake.”
“What about your ear?” He asked.
I stopped smiling and caught my breath. I carefully touched my ear. “Why do you ask?”
“You earlobe,” Virgil said, “it’s bleeding.”
There was a spot of blood on my ear and an infinitely small insect, an acari, perched on the tip of my finger. “How do you suppose that happened?”
Virgil mirrored my own confusion. The house’s two iron gates began to swing back and forth and rattle on its hinges. The branches on trees inside the gate began to sway toward the car, twitching and grasping, as if a conscious force animated them.
“Would you look at that,” Virgil said. He shifted the car into reverse and pointed at the trees engaged in a grotesque dance behind the wall. “It looks like a storm is blowing up.”
“Only one thing wrong with that forecast,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Can’t you see?” I said, “There isn’t a breeze stirring out here, not a breath of air anywhere.”
The limb of a tree scraped the car’s side window with a shrieking sound and Virgil panicked, slammed the accelerator to the floor with his foot, and threw dust and gravel everywhere. The tires eventually found traction and the vehicle lurched forward.
“Let’s clear out of here,” he said.
Virgil kept his mouth shut tightly against the temptation to say, ‘I told you so.’ I could almost sense the words gathering on his tongue, even though his eyes were intent upon the road.
“It’s a strange house,” he said, leaving me to wonder how deeply from inside he spoke.
“Strange? You can’t be serious; it’s a great house, built like a…temple,” I said, repeating his earlier view, and then added, “Did I tell you, I killed a snake?”
“Yeah, you told me.”
“I ‘think’ I killed a snake,” I said once more.
“That place is crawling with them,” he said, impatiently.
I decided not to tell him that the snake I had killed, whether imagined or not, was an ‘old world’ snake, one that was not indigenous to the USA, and certainly not to West Virginia, but to Asia.
*
We drove through the little town of Elanville, passed thin elderly men and women working in scraggly gardens behind ruined shacks. Small knots of ragged children played near broken windows stuffed with rags to prevent the chill air from creeping in.
Nearly everyone had physical peculiarities that I questioned, which may have had something to do with my dreams since I return to the US.
I frequently dreamed of people with physical impairments that prevented them from performing the simplest life-sustaining tasks. Sometimes their problems extended to facial features, especially their eyes.
Virgil jumped on the brake again and slid nearly sideways onto the berm before coming to a stop.
“Did you forget something?” I asked.
I stared out the rear window and at Virgil. His eyes filled with an intensity that did not inspire confidence.
“There’s something about the wall that I forgot to tell you,” he said. “I know a stone mason you might want to meet.”
He turned the key and the motor growled, gravel sprayed from beneath the tires and the Ford slithered back onto the road. When he reached the paved road, I was relieved to bid farewell to Elanville, which should have told me something. He swerved suddenly on to another gravel road.
“This guy can tell you everything you want to know about walls,” he said.
“What’s to know?” I replied. “It a good strong wall, one of the finest I’ve ever seen.”
Grass was growing knee-deep between the tire paths and Virgil was driving 60 miles an hour. At one point, the tires left the ground and the car pancaked on its frame.
“Why are you driving so fast?” I asked.
Virgil’s brow was glistening with perspiration. He glanced at the speedometer and eased off the accelerator.
“I wasn’t thinking,” he said. “I’m sorry. I am just anxious to find Walter. He’s a stone mason and knows all about building walls.”
The road slanted up a steep incline and flattened out on top of the ridge. Two houses were under construction and in various stages of completion. A three-man crew was selecting round river rock for the fireplace chimneys.
Virgil eased the wagon between two aging pickup trucks loaded with sand and bags of mortar. A lean angular man with a scarred and sallow complexion met us halfway. He kept both hands in the bib of his coveralls and viewed our pr
esence as a violation of some sort. He stuffed a twist of chewing tobacco into the pocket of his cheek.
“Walter this is Charles Case; Charlie, this is Walter Kepler.”
His hand was rough as concrete and nearly as hard. I felt spoiled and pampered in the presence of men who thrived on physical labor. I envied them their calluses.
“That’s a nice touch,” I said, indicating the stone going up against the side of the house.
He nodded in pointless affirmation.
“Walter, I told Mr. Case about your accident at the Ryder house.”
The builder spit contemptuously. “Accident, hell; it weren’t no accident. Something out there took hold of me and wouldn’t let go.”
I’d pegged Kepler as the son of Hungarian immigrants with ancestors that may have been celebrated sculptors, artists, possibly scientists. The angry tone of his response, however, also raised the possibility of bomb-throwing anarchists in the family tree.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Just what I said,” he replied, rolling up the sleeve of his shirt and revealing three long scars that ran from elbow to wrist. “I thought I was going to lose my arm trying to get free.”
I wanted to ask, ‘free from what?’ but felt I could not handle any more contempt.
“Were you on the property?” I asked.
He shook his head and spat again but with less premeditation.
“No, I was examining the wall. I admired it for years and thought I’d take a closer look. I’ve never seen a wall stand up so well to the elements. Did you notice? You can follow the wall around the house and not find a stone out of place.”
I considered it, but chose instead the more direct route to the house. Walter rushed in with more details. “It’s an old wall, the kind you might see in history books, especially books on Indian or early American culture. I climbed on the wall to take a look and that’s when something grabbed me.”
“What grabbed you?” I asked, feeling like a voyeur.
“Hell, I don’t know what it was, but my arm felt like it was in the jaws of a vice, a vice with teeth.”
“How’d you manage to get away?” I asked, as if I too were avoiding the inevitable confrontation.
“I managed to pull loose and jump over the wall.”
“While lying on the ground,” he said, “I heard a strange moaning sound, but it could have been me. I was in a lot of pain.”
He worked the earth with the toe of his shoe and spat again, gaining a little more variation each time with the rusty pattern of expectorant.
“I got dizzy from holding my head at an angle,” he said, “but I’d been sick all day with a headache and fever. Now that I think about it, I don’t know what I was doing there in the first place.”
After a moment’s reflection, I thought I knew that feeling too.
“Why are you asking these questions?” Walter wanted to know. “Are you going to buy the Ryder house?”
Rather than invite ridicule, I did not answer.
He studied the tobacco stain on the ground as if it were an ancient rune.
“It’s a curious house,” he said, leafing through a file of forgotten memories, “especially the wall. There’s only one other like it in the county.”
I was not surprised to learn there were similar walls in the county, even though I should have expected it.
“Where?” I asked anxiously.
“The state hospital,” he replied.
In the moment of silence that passed between us, I could hear the grass growing and the concrete footers hardening in the ground.
“They’re not exactly alike,” he said, “but I’ll bet a month’s pay the man who built the wall around the Ryder house also built the wall around the hospital.”
“And who was that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, “but one thing I know is stone work, and those walls are the work of one man.”
For obvious reasons, I felt relieved to learn that people could survive behind them.
“Thank you, Mr. Kepler. I appreciate your assistance.”
“Anytime,” he said, shifting the cud of tobacco from one cheek to the other and retracing his steps to the job site.
We returned to the car. “Is there any way to find out who constructed those walls?” I asked.
“What difference does that make?” Virgil asked.
At a loss to explain my own rambling, I shrugged. The wall, I knew, meant something important to the house, but I did not know what or why. Was it keeping something in or out?
“There does seem to be something unusual about it,” I said.
Virgil took his time responding. He was enjoying the last rays of day light on his face. “There may be a building permit or something on record at the courthouse, but you’ll have to wait until Monday to find out.”
I scratched the stubble of a beard that was beginning to itch and darken my neck and chin.
“That settles it,” I said. “If I’m going to hang around all weekend, I might as well buy it.”
The elation I thought I would feel -- once I’d made the commitment to buy -- fell short of expectations. My stomach did a little anxious flip and I turned to see if Virgil would try to talk me out of it.
“Good, let’s get back to the office and get your signature on a contract before you change your mind.”
Chapter Five
While Virgil filled in the dotted lines, I painted the lobe of my ear with iodine. “I must have cut it on greenbrier,” I said, knowing the incident had occurred before running through the thick brush.
Virgil stopped typing, clasped both hands behind his head and leaned in his chair.
“I read a newspaper article a few years ago about the hospital. The writer quoted the super as saying 'there would not be a maintenance cost if the buildings were as ‘impregnable’ as the wall’. At the time, I thought he was exaggerating.”
“Did the paper mention the name of the mason?” I asked.
“I think it was a mystery to the writer, too, but unless I’m mistaken, it did say something about the old People’s Bank building having some similar stone work done.”
He resumed typing while reconstructing the bridge to the past: paused again and rocked slowly in the swivel chair.
“It’s not a bank anymore,” he said. “They tried to raze it in the late 40s, but it gave contractors a lot of trouble. The stone work crowning the top of the building was a problem, so they converted the building into a drugstore and offices.”
While he ruminated, I raided a desk drawer and found a pack of gum. I was enjoying the first shots of the sweet juices when the connection fixed itself in my mind.
“So whoever built the wall around the mansion and the hospital also did the stone work on the bank. He apparently knew something about masonry others don’t,” I said. “The wall may also be related to other accidents.”
Virgil’s silence, I suspected, meant concurrence.
“Why don’t we have dinner together?” He asked. “We’ll get my wife’s opinion. She’s an Upshyre County Republican and knows all about this town and the people in it.”
*
Virgil’s home was only a few minutes from the office. When he walked in the side door, his wife’s eyes flashed like sabers and then cooled to a steel gray hardness.
The table was set, the food was cold and two small children, a boy and a girl, had already succeeded in splattering each other with food.
He kissed her cautiously on the tense, upturned cheek. Her ‘slice and dice’ eyes never wandered far from his.
“Why didn’t you say you were bringing company home for dinner, Virgil?” she asked in a lilting voice.
A smile was transfixed on her tired but youthful face, while her eyes sparkled at my presence. Those eyes, I could see, served as hooks to troll in deep waters and impale vagrant hearts.
“Violet, this is Charles Case; he’s buying the Ryder house.”
She offered a hand, lig
htly scented with flour and salt, a touch of hand cream and dish soap, very fragrant overall. She was attractive, but the look on her face suggested she was coming unraveled by the monotony of homemaking, which weighed heavily on her.
“So what do you think of the Ryder mausoleum?” she asked, giving my wardrobe a casual but curious glance.
“It’s a fine house…tomb,” I replied.
“It is that,” she said. “Did you go in?” she asked, hopefully, as if one incident might break the chain of strange events surrounding the place.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
“What stopped you?” she asked in a way that encouraged what I suspected to be a challenge.
“He cut his ear,” Virgil said.
She tried to wound him with one of the sabers flashing in her eyes.
“Is it serious?” she asked, holding a verbal blade to his throat.
“No,” I said, “I may have snagged it on a thorn.”
“Good,” she said, sheathing her weapon in a smile.
Virgil shuffled quietly out of the kitchen into the dining room and returned with a newspaper. Violet’s eyes and attention shifted.
“You must tell me everything that happened, Mr. Case,” she said, while laying a plate and silverware at the child-abandoned table, “Every exciting detail. I’m a collector of bits and pieces of arcana about the Ryders. My mother was acquainted with Elinore and her father did business with Samuel Ryder. He was reputed to be a powerful man, but he didn’t spend much time at the house on Scary Creek. He spent most of his time in Washington DC.”
“Is your mother still alive, Mrs. Stamper?” I asked.
“Very much so, Mr. Case, but please, call me Violet and I’ll call you Charles,” she said.
“I will, and I hope I’ll have a chance to meet your mother. I’m anxious to find out all I can about the Ryder House.”