by Tim Pratt
Then again, as far as murder plots go, this one would be pretty dumb. My family knew I was here, and plenty of other people had seen me meet with Trey…unless he was running a murder cult with his grandpa and June and old racist Doris (okay, her, I’d believe). I didn’t really think I was in a southern Gothic horror movie scenario, but I defy you to spend eleven hours driving and then squeeze your car through a wall of rhododendrons and proceed along a road of dust and not have the occasional dark speculation.
The name of the place I was going didn’t help. Archibald Grace’s property wasn’t in the town of Boone, but a bit outside it, in an unincorporated area called—da dum—Meat Camp. Sounds like a summer workshop for cannibals, though Trey assured me the area got the name because hunters used to slaughter their kills there.
Way comforting.
I glanced at the screen on my phone, and found we were off the map entirely, the little blue dot of my progress moving across a trackless nothing: I was on a street that didn’t exist.
That made a bit more sense when we crested a rise and I saw the house in the little hollow before me. That two-mile dirt road wasn’t a road at all, properly speaking; it was just the driveway leading to my new house.
“New” in the sense of new to me, of course. The house looked like it might be older than the trees towering all around it, at least in parts. I parked next to Trey, then got out of my car and stood beside the open door of my car, trying to take in the scene before me. Trey emerged from his car and looked at me, half smiling, clearly waiting to see how I’d take the revelation that was the Grace house. I was reminded of those videos where people feed lemons to their babies just to see how they’ll react.
The place had clearly started life as a wooden farmhouse, the main structure two stories high with a round attic window peeking out from the vertex of the peaked roof, but over the years rooms had been added, and more rooms, and now the house sprouted sprawling additions from both sides, its mismatched wings rambling off toward the trees that pressed in on both sides.
A conical tower rose up over the peaked roof, and there were balconies and widow’s walks clinging to the roof and the walls, along with a profusion of lightning rods, weather vanes shaped like fanciful animals, and what appeared to be purely ornamental wrought iron spikes. There was a wraparound porch, sort of—much of the space had been enclosed and incorporated into the greater structure of the house, but there was a clear spot by the front door, holding a couple of rocking chairs and a swing on ancient black metal chains.
The thing about the house that I couldn’t get over was its vastness. I grew up in a condo near downtown Chicago, but it wasn’t like I’d never spent time in big houses—I had friends who lived in five-story behemoths in Oak Park—but this place just sprawled, and I had the impression it continued on back for some distance, too. It wasn’t exactly English country house huge, because those big mansions you see on TV are built all at once, in a unified way, on purpose. This place was more like a nautilus shell, with the house getting larger and larger organically over the years.
The front and side yards were crowded with…well, junk, to be charitable. Old appliances, stacks of wooden pallets, oil drums, tangled piles of rusting rebar, an ancient washing machine complete with hand-cranked rollers on top, tractor tires…my mind gave up on doing any sort of thorough inventory before I got too far.
“Yes, it’s true—all this can be yours.” Trey’s voice wavered between amused and deadpan, and he had a half smile that could have been a smirk but instead managed to be charming. He pointed to a pair of vehicles parked in the shade of a towering oak tree off to the left: an old Studebaker truck, red paint faded to pink, and a dusty but intact black vintage roadster of some kind, with an open top and big bulging headlights. “Last I heard, both of those run, though the truck sounds pretty rough. I’ve got the titles for you. If you want to sell the Allard, you could make pretty good money, though not as much as you would if Mr. Grace had taken better care of it.”
“I, just…this is a lot to take in.”
Trey nodded, then walked around his car toward me. “I can imagine. I’ve got your keys. The power’s turned on, and the phone, and I bought a few basic staples for the kitchen. If there’s anything else you need, you can run into town—once you get past the end of the driveway your GPS should work okay; the house itself is just in some kind of a dead zone. You can actually get cable out here, believe it or not, which means you can get Internet. I can help you set all that up, if you want.” He pressed a heavy ring of keys into my hand.
“Ah…so that’s it? I’m a homeowner?”
He laughed. “That’s it. We’ve got the deed and all that back at the office; you can have them anytime you want, or we can keep holding them in our safe. Mr. Grace had my firm on retainer for decades, and he paid us well to make sure you got settled in here, if you decided to stay. But now that you’ve seen the place…” He trailed off.
“What?”
He looked a little uncomfortable, or actually a lot uncomfortable—like he’d swallowed a wasp. “It’s none of my business, really…”
“Oh. You want to know if you should just sell the place for me and send a check?”
He nodded. “My grandfather wanted me to make the offer, but you’ve been driving forever—it’s probably not the right time to make a decision like that.”
I looked at the house. It was like something from a children’s book, the kind with wolves who speak in human voices and secrets hidden in the attic and maybe the occasional ghost. “I’ll think about it. But if Mr. Grace was really my family, there might be stuff in that house I’d like to know about. I think I’ll stay awhile. The place is in livable condition, right?”
Trey gazed at the looming house and nodded. “It is. I can’t promise all the additions are up to code—Mr. Grace did a lot of the work himself. I hear he was a pretty good carpenter, but he sure didn’t worry too much about how it looked.”
“Obviously,” I said with a pointed look at the house.
Trey laughed, and while he did, I thought more about what he’d said. This mysterious Archibald Grace was maybe my father, almost certainly some kind of secret kin—and he was good with his hands. He liked making things. That was something, a known fact, from a part of my life noticeably short of those. “What was he like? Mr. Grace?”
Trey shook his head, the good humor draining from his face. “I only met him a few times—he didn’t come into the office often. My grandfather dealt with him, mostly, and usually he’d come out here to do it. Mr. Grace was one of his first clients. This wasn’t his primary residence, I don’t think—he came out and stayed in the summers, most years, from what I understand.”
“Huh. So he owned other property? Who inherited that?” I was wondering if I had other mystery relatives—ones that were actually alive, and who could answer questions.
“I think most of it was sold off—some of it probably trickled down into that check I gave you.”
“Huh. For a summer house, this place definitely looks lived-in.”
“Wait until you see the inside. I went along on a walk-through with my dad and an appraiser after we got word Mr. Grace had passed on, just to see what we were dealing with, and to make sure the structure was sound.” He pointed out a few of the two dozen keys on the ring he’d given me, each one marked with a colored dot. “That one will get you in the front door, and those are keys for the truck and the roadster. As for the other keys…who knows. There are plenty of locks in the house they might fit.” He looked me over seriously. “Listen—I should let you get settled in. You must be exhausted after your drive. Come to the office when you have a chance, maybe tomorrow, and we’ll take care of the paperwork. If you like, I can come by and walk you around the grounds, answer any questions you have.”
“The grounds? How much land are we talking about?”
“Forty-two acres. Most of it’s wooded, and a lot of it’s steep and not easily accessible, but I can show you t
he property boundaries.”
On the one hand, I didn’t want to be alone out here in this weird old house, but on the other hand, I was exhausted. The first hand won. “If you have time, could you come in with me for a few minutes? I don’t know, it’s ridiculous, but—”
He laughed. “What, you’re nervous about wandering into a giant old house in the middle of nowhere by yourself? I would be, too. Sure. I can’t give you the grand tour—there are rooms I haven’t even seen—but I’ll walk through with you and show off the highlights.”
I led the way up the creaking wooden steps. “If this were a movie, the house would be haunted,” I said, looking at the closed door. “A long-lost relative I’ve never heard of leaves me his house in the woods? How does that end well?”
“If the door creaks ominously, that’s how you know it’s haunted,” Trey said. “Never fails.”
Good shoulders and funny, too. I liked the guy more and more. I put the key in the knob, twisted, and pushed open the door, which did not creak ominously, or indeed at all. I glanced at Trey. “So that’s a good sign.”
“You could say that.” He gave me a sly grin. “I oiled the hinges myself.”
I snorted, and walked in. I didn’t make it far. Before I managed three steps I stopped and gaped. “Trey. This is like a hoarder house.”
Every bit of wall space in the front room was covered in wooden shelves, from plain board affairs to elaborately carved mahogany bookcases that doubled as objets d’art, and every shelf was crammed, and not usually with books. The walls above the shelves, all the way up to the fourteen-foot-high ceiling, were hung with wooden masks, dingy oil paintings in ornate frames, tapestries, tin signs, and ancient posters held up with yellowing tape. Model airplanes and birdhouses hung from the ceiling. The floor was uneven, covered in overlapping layers of fine Oriental rugs, hand-hooked throws, and ugly fake fur things in shades of electric blue that belonged in a kid’s playroom.
“More like a museum with a really undiscriminating curator,” Trey said. “It’s not like there are plastic bottles and rotting pumpkins and heaps of newspapers, and it’s even halfway organized. It’s just…stuff.”
There were at least three couches, in wildly different styles, arranged in the living room, along with a couple of armchairs, two coffee tables, and six or seven end tables, all crowded with lamps and vases and little stone statues and flowers made of beads and wire. An umbrella stand by the door sprouted handles, and I began to pull them up and inspect them, rattling off an inventory: “Umbrella, umbrella, cane, ugly umbrella, cane, cool walking stick, cane—” That last one felt strangely heavy, and when I twisted the brass knob on top, it clicked and something came loose. “Wait. Is this a sword cane?” I tugged on the knob, sliding out six or eight inches of gleaming steel from the black sheath.
“You do much dueling?” Trey said.
“If I didn’t, this would be a great day to start.”
“Good to keep it by the door. You never know when you might need to swordfight the UPS guy.”
I put the cane away. At least if I got paranoid about being alone here in the dark later I knew where to find a weapon. “Okay. Show me the rest?”
Trey led me around the downstairs. The bathroom was clean and well stocked with towels and only mildly filled with glass bowls of potpourri and novelty soaps in the shapes of seashells and sushi and cupcakes. The kitchen was huge and surprisingly modern, all white and silver and blond wood, though the counters and center island were crammed with mason jars and novelty saltshakers and cookie jars in the shapes of cats, blimps, pumpkins, frogs, robots, potbellied demons, and other things.
“H. P. Lovecraft wrote that the most merciful thing about the human mind is its inability to correlate all its contents,” I said, leaning against a counter. “I don’t think I’ve got a chance in hell of correlating all the contents of this house.”
“If the house is a reflection of Mr. Grace’s mental state, it suggests a certain amount of disorganization, I’ll grant you that.” He opened a door on a space the size of a walk-in closet or a dorm room. “Here’s the pantry—beans, rice, sugar, flour, canned goods, cereal, granola bars…” He shrugged. “I didn’t know what you’d want. The bottom shelf is all stuff that belonged to your—well, uncle or grandpa or whatever Mr. Grace was—that hasn’t expired yet. As far as I can tell. A lot of the labels are in Japanese or other languages, I don’t know what. He had interesting tastes.”
I leaned back against the counter and stretched my arms over my head, working out some of the ten thousand kinks from the long trip. “That’s fine. I’ve always been adventurous.”
He opened his mouth to say something, then made a weird face—like he’d bitten into something sour while simultaneously having a negative epiphany—and shook his head. When he did speak, he was brusque, and he didn’t make eye contact. “Bedrooms are upstairs—the master bedroom is the second door on the right, just off the landing.” He glanced at his watch. “I should get back to the office.” He took out a business card, then scrawled a number on the back and handed it over. “That’s my cell. As I said, Mr. Grace paid us to make sure you got settled, so don’t hesitate if you need anything. Let me know when you’d like me to show you around the property.”
I walked him back to the front door, though he left so fast, it was more like I chased him. He was totally professional when he shook my hand good-bye, but I still wondered why he’d gone from cheerful-helpful-guy to busy-lawyer-on-the-go. Maybe he’d just finally caught a whiff of my piquant combination of road sweat and fast-food residue. Or more likely he’d realized I wasn’t going to sell the place right away, giving him a cut of the profits to handle the business, and in the absence of a financial incentive he could only feign friendliness for so long.
Too bad. He was cute, and I’d enjoyed his company even in my road-weary state, but I wasn’t so desperate for a friend in this place that I’d bother trying to win over someone who felt the need to flee my presence.
Once he was gone I locked the door, as festooned with dead bolts and chains as the most paranoid inner-city Chicago apartment dweller’s. I found all the hardware very comforting. Intellectually, I knew I was less likely to be serial-killed in a place this rural and remote than in a city full of potential predators, but I’ve seen enough horror movies to have a healthy irrational fear of cannibal redneck zombies just the same.
Besides: I didn’t need to be serial-killed. A one-off murder would be just as bad.
The stairs were steep and narrow, and led to a small landing with a rickety-looking wooden railing protecting me from an accidental plunge to the living room below. Beyond that was a long hallway lined with more doors than a hotel corridor. The door to the master bedroom was standing open, and any reasonable person in my condition would have wandered in and collapsed on the first bed-shaped object she encountered, but I was feeling weirdly buzzed and wired—my place, mine!—so I figured I’d check out the other rooms first.
I rattled doorknobs, but most of them were locked, and two of the three that did open were just undifferentiated junk rooms, crammed with boxes and sewing equipment and dressmaker’s mannequins and unicycles and bundled-up volleyball nets; the other was a small bathroom. Why have locks on all these interior doors anyway? My dead benefactor had been the paranoid type, apparently. If we were related by blood, I hoped getting squirrelly in old age wasn’t genetic.
Through diligent effort and the process of elimination with my key ring, I managed to get all five of the remaining doors unlocked: three bedrooms with actual beds in them (buried in heaps of junk), and another two jumbled storage rooms. The window in one of the bedrooms was blocked off, offering a view of blank plywood—presumably one of the additions to the house I hadn’t explored yet had been built right across the window.
Classy.
Satisfied that there were neither treasure chests nor lurking monsters in the vicinity, I went to check out the master bedroom. The space was huge, almost as large as
the living room, dominated by a great four-poster bed with intricately carved columns. Of course the room was cluttered, but not as badly as the rest of the house—there was even a bedside table that held nothing but a lamp, an empty glass, and the kind of wristwatch that probably cost more than my entire college education. A massive dark wardrobe dominated one wall—the kind of thing that looked like it ought to lead to a world full of talking beavers and guys with goat hooves instead of feet—to the right of a window that let in the late afternoon summer sunlight. There was an armchair, throne-like and covered in purple velvet, and next to that, something taller than me, draped in a white sheet, leaning against the wall opposite the bed.
I tugged the drop cloth down, revealing a mirror at least seven feet high and five feet wide, with an elaborate frame topped by an intricately carved, life-size depiction of a lion’s head, though its left ear was chipped off and its jaws grotesquely extended so that it seemed the vastness of the mirror was the big cat’s gaping mouth.
Not wanting to sit up in bed and catch sight of my reflection and have a half-asleep home-invasion freak-out, I covered the mirror again. I didn’t touch the glass.
If I had, I would have figured out what I was really dealing with a little earlier, maybe.