by John Saul
From the front of the house there was no way even to guess what might be at the back.
For the next half hour they picked their way through the house, moving from one room to another. On the first floor, in addition to the living room and reception room, they found a dining room—easily large enough for a table to seat twenty-four—a library, a kitchen and pantry with a large service porch behind, and several smaller chambers that had apparently served as rooms for cards, music, sewing, and a variety of other activities. A conservatory constructed of three glass walls surmounted by an enormous glass dome extended out from the northern side of the house. Except for three cracked panes, the skylight was miraculously unbroken.
It was on the second floor, while her parents were exploring a large suite of rooms that lay above the library, that Kim felt it.
Suddenly her skin was crawling, as if a large insect were creeping across her neck. She jumped, reflexively brushing at the unseen creature, and the sensation vanished.
Steadying herself against the mahogany railing while her racing heart calmed, she glanced around for Jared, who had been with her only a moment before.
He seemed to have disappeared.
Then, a few paces away, she saw a door standing slightly ajar, and knew her brother must have gone into the room beyond it.
She started toward the door.
And felt it again.
This time it was an icy cold chill that fell over her, momentarily stopping her breath. She tried to call out to Jared, but the same paralysis that had fallen over her lungs had taken her voice as well. A terrible panic rose in her as the cold tightened its grip.
With no warning, the house itself had taken on a menacing quality, and she had a terrible feeling that she was about to die, that somehow this cavernous, decaying place was going to swallow her whole, and she would vanish, just as Jared seemed to have done a moment before.
"Kim? Hey, Kim! What's wrong?" The words startled her. She spun around to find Jared gazing worriedly at her. "What's wrong? How come you called me?"
For a split second Kim didn't trust herself even to speak, but then, as quickly as it had come over her, the strange sensations—the crawling skin, the icy chill, the strange paralysis—were gone.
Gone so completely that even her memory was fading with the rapidity of a dream vanishing in morning light, vivid one second, utterly gone only a moment later.
"I—I didn't call you," she stammered. Or had she? In the back of her mind she thought she felt a vague memory of wanting to call out to her brother. "D-Did I?" she asked.
Jared's concern congealed into fear. A second ago, in the bedroom a few feet away, he'd been positive he heard Kim's voice. And not just calling him, either.
She had been screaming—screaming in terror.
He had heard it!
Yet what could have caused her to scream? He glanced around, not knowing what he might be looking for. Could it have been a mouse, or even a rat? But Kim wasn't a sissy; some scurrying creature would only have provoked a surprised yelp.
What he'd heard—at least what he thought he heard—was the anguished cry of someone in fear for her life.
Now, though, she was staring at him, her head cocked, her eyes wide, her expression puzzled.
He remembered, then, something that had happened a few years ago, when they were eleven. Their mother had taken them for a picnic by a lake, and they'd gone swimming. He had hauled himself out onto a large wooden float, and was sprawled on his back, gazing up at the clouds floating overhead, when he'd heard exactly the same kind of scream from Kim as the one of a few moments earlier. He'd scrambled to his feet and scanned the water, but she was nowhere to be seen.
Then he'd looked down.
Kim, her eyes open and staring up at him, was lying on the bottom of the lake, under ten feet of crystal clear water.
She wasn't moving.
Without thinking, he'd dived for her, dragging her to the surface and wrestling her onto the float.
He'd started screaming himself then, calling frantically for help while trying to force the water from Kim's lungs. Others—grown-ups—arrived and took over, and after what seemed an eternity, but which he'd later been told was no more than a minute or two, Kim started breathing on her own again.
Afterward, when they asked him how he'd known his sister was drowning, it turned out that only he had heard her scream.
No one else heard anything.
Thinking about it, replaying those panicked moments in his mind, he knew his sister couldn't have screamed; even if she had, there was no way the sound would have carried out of the water.
It was, he'd finally decided, the Twin Thing, that strange, almost mystical connection he and his sister had always felt.
Today, though, he saw nothing that could have terrified Kim to the point of a scream. Not like that.
As if she'd read his mind—the Twin Thing again—Kim's eyes fixed on him. "Jared, what's going on? I swear, I didn't call you!" She paused, then spoke again, and he knew she truly had read his mind. "And I didn't even call you in my mind, like I did at the lake that day."
Jared hesitated, then shrugged. "Hey, if you don't remember, why should I?" he finally said. "And maybe it wasn't you at all—maybe it was a ghost!" He scanned the hallway, gave an exaggerated shudder, then fixed his sister with the most mysterious gaze he could muster. "Want to see if we can find one? If ghosts are real, this sure is where they'd be."
A moment later, the strange sensation she'd experienced all but forgotten, Kim set out with Jared to explore the second floor. Half a dozen bedrooms opened off the mezzanine—two of which had small parlors attached to them—along with three bathrooms. There were a few more rooms that were locked, but none of the keys their father had seemed to fit.
On the third floor, tucked beneath the huge oaken rafters that supported the slate roof, were half a dozen more rooms, each with a dormer window, those on the west side looking out over the town, the others over the wilderness to the east.
Finally, after they'd seen as much of the house as they could gain access to, the family gathered on the front porch.
"Well, what do you think?" Ted asked as they made their way back to the car. There was an excitement in his voice that immediately put Janet on her guard. A thought had come to her fifteen minutes ago—a thought she had instantly rejected. The electric note in his question told her the same thought had also occurred to Ted. Before he even spoke, she knew what he was going to say. "It would make a great little hotel, wouldn't it?"
At least a dozen answers to Ted's question popped into Janet's mind, every one of them negative. Instead of voicing even one of them, she slowly turned around and looked back at the immense derelict of a house that had sat abandoned for the last forty years.
She thought about Ted, and what his future in Shreveport might be. Though neither of them had talked about it yet, she knew there would be no job offer, not for a very long time.
Which meant there was nothing to hold them in Shreveport; she had no family there, and neither did he.
In the last few years most of their friends had drifted away, unwilling to deal with Ted's drinking.
Even the kids' friends didn't come over anymore.
Though she had never been a particularly religious person, it occurred to Janet to wonder if it was truly a coincidence that Cora Conway had died and left them this house at the very moment when their own lives had come to a crossroads.
"I hate to say it," she finally replied as she got into the car, "but you might just be right."
From the backseat Kim, too, peered out at the house.
Once again her skin began to crawl, and she felt a terrible chill.
And a single thought came into her mind: No! Please, God, no! Don't make us live here!
Two pairs of eyes—each of them unseen by the other—watched as the dented and dust-covered Toyota disappeared down the road. When it was finally gone, and even the dust it kicked up had settled, both
sets of eyes shifted back to the great hulking shape of the house that had stood empty for the last four decades.
Now, both of the watchers were certain, it was about to be occupied again.
Still unseen by one another, their gazes shifted once more, and fixed upon the huge magnolia tree. From its lowest branch George Conway had hanged himself.
One of the watchers began silently to pray.
The other—equally silent—began to curse.
CHAPTER 6
Three days later they were back in St. Albans. As their father pulled the car to a stop in front of the Gothic facade the church of St. Ignatius Loyola presented to the street, Kim and Jared looked at the school that stood across from it.
The school they would be attending, starting the next day.
"Maybe it'll be all right," Jared muttered, though neither he nor Kim had any real idea of what to expect. "I mean, how much different can it be?"
"It's going to be a lot different," he heard his father say, making Jared wish he'd kept silent. "For one thing, you'll get a decent education. They don't coddle the kids in parochial school the way they do where you two have been going. And they don't put up with any nonsense, either."
Jared knew it would be useless to remind his father that both he and Kim had always gotten straight A's, and that neither of them had ever been in any trouble. After all, his father hadn't listened to a word either of them had said for the last two days.
They were moving to St. Albans because some uncle who had died before he was even born had left them a house and enough money to fix it up and turn it into a hotel.
And he and Kim were going to parochial school because that same uncle had wanted it that way, including in the trust a clause directing that any children benefiting from it would attend St. Ignatius Loyola School.
"But we don't want to go to parochial school," he'd objected, speaking for Kim as well. "We haven't even gone to church since we were little kids. None of us have!"
Nothing they said had made a difference. For two days they listened to their father talk about what a great opportunity they were being given, and how much they should appreciate what they were being offered.
And they watched him drink.
Jared suspected that none of the great opportunities his father kept talking about would materialize. Even if his father stayed sober long enough to get the work done and actually open a hotel—and Jared was sure he wouldn't—why would anyone want to stay there? And if the customers stopped coming, his father would drink even more. The day before yesterday—after his father had passed out—he'd talked to his mother about it, and for the first time he heard exactly how bad the situation was.
"He's not going to be able to get another job," his mother explained. "We have a little less than one hundred dollars in the bank. When that's gone, I don't know what we'll do."
"I'll get a job—" Jared began, but his mother shook her head.
"For now, you'll go to school. If you keep your grades up, you'll be able to get a scholarship for college. But if you get a job, your grades will slip."
"But it won't work!" Jared protested. "Dad will just sit home and drink all day!" The pain he'd seen in his mother's eyes made Jared wince, and for a moment he thought she was going to cry. Instead, she'd taken a deep breath and put both her hands on his shoulders.
"If that happens," she told him, looking steadily into his eyes, "I promise we won't stay. I don't know how we'll do it, or where we'll go, but I'll take you and Kim and Molly, and we'll leave. But we have to give him a chance. We have to let him try."
So yesterday they had loaded a U-Haul with everything they owned, and this morning they'd driven down from Shreveport, his father driving the truck while the ' rest of them—including his dog and Kim's cat—packed themselves into the Toyota. Fortunately, Scout was even more placid than most golden retrievers, and had long since decided that Muffin, not being another dog, wasn't worth bothering with. While Muffin curled up in Kim's lap, Scout had fallen asleep between them, waking up only when Molly, strapped into her own seat, managed to grasp his tail and give it a good yank.
They arrived at the church just ten minutes before the funeral mass for Cora Conway was scheduled to begin. It had been almost ten years since Ted Conway last attended a mass, and now, as he stood at the threshold of St. Ignatius Loyola, he hesitated.
His eyes instinctively went to the face of the figure on the cross above the altar, and though he tried to look away, the agonized gaze of the martyred Christ held him.
Reproaching him?
Accusing him?
Superstition, Ted told himself. None of it's anything more than superstition. But even as he silently reassured himself that it was nothing more than his own rejection of the religion he'd been raised in that had kept him away from church all those years, the throbbing in his head refused to let him forget the real reason he'd stayed in bed so many Sunday mornings. So what if I have a couple of drinks on Saturday night? Ted asked the silent figure that peered steadily at him from its place above the altar. A knot of resentment hardened in his belly, and he wished he had a drink. He started down the aisle toward the waiting pews, but the reflexes bred into him in the first ten years of his life overtook him, and his fingers dipped into the font of holy water that stood just inside the door.
His knees bent slightly in an automatic act of genuflection.
He crossed himself.
Only then did the tortured eyes of the figure on the cross finally release him and let him start down the aisle of the nearly empty church.
Janet followed, holding Molly.
Kim and Jared glanced uneasily at each other, then quickly dipped their fingers in the holy water in imitation of their parents and walked down the aisle, taking seats next to each other in the front pew. They stared at the coffin that stood in front of the altar, its lid closed.
Three sparse floral remembrances—along with the emptiness of the church—gave testimony to the loneliness of the years Cora Conway had spent at the Willows. As an unseen organist began playing softly in the background, Janet sighed and wished that she'd come to visit the old woman more often. Why had she assumed that her husband's aunt had friends who were visiting her? Obviously she hadn't. As the priest came in from a side door, signaled them to rise, and began the opening prayers of the mass, she quickly scanned the church and saw that it was still all but empty.
In fact, besides the five of them and the priest who was conducting the mass, there were only two other people present.
A middle-aged woman clad in a navy blue suit—her face veiled—stood in the very last pew, nervously twisting a pair of gloves in her hands.
And in one of the alcoves—barely visible from the church—Janet caught a glimpse of another priest. Had he come to the mass for Cora, or was he merely tending to his own private devotions, silently offering prayers to one of the saints, oblivious to the memorial service taking place only a few feet away?
The officiating priest finished his opening prayer, gestured to them to sit, then turned his back to them so he faced the coffin and the altar beyond. Raising his arms in supplication, he began to speak. To Janet's surprise—and for the first time since she was a little girl and had attended the funeral mass of her own grandmother—she heard the rhythmical cadences of the Latin mass.
"Jesus," she heard Ted whisper beside her. "If we'd known this was the deal, we wouldn't have bothered to come!"
Janet shot him a warning look. "She must have wanted it," she whispered back. "And it won't hurt us."
Ted's eyes rolled scornfully, and a few minutes later his head dropped forward onto his chest as he fell asleep.
An hour later, as the last phrases of the prayer of benediction rolled from the priest's tongue, Ted came awake and, responding to childhood memories similar to those stirring in Janet, straightened in the pew and dropped automatically to his knees. He crossed himself once more, then made his way past his wife and children to perform the single act his
aunt had required of him.
Joining five men from the undertaker's who entered the church from one of the side doors, he took his position at the head of his aunt's casket to bear her out of the church to her final resting place. Janet, holding a sleeping Molly, stood with Jared and Kim as the casket passed, followed by the priest. As she started up the aisle, Janet glanced into the side chapel where she'd seen the elderly priest just as the service was beginning.
He lay prostrate on the stone floor, his arms spread wide. He seemed oblivious to the tiny procession passing behind him.
Janet blinked as she stepped out of the cool gloom of the church into the sultry heat of the Indian summer afternoon. As she followed the coffin toward the open grave that waited in the far corner of the small cemetery adjoining the church, she had the uncomfortable feeling that she was being watched. She tried to ignore it at first, telling herself that of course anyone who happened to be passing by the graveyard would glance in; perhaps even linger long enough to watch the burial. Surreptitiously, she glanced around, but before she could spot whoever might be watching, her eyes were caught by the inscription on a weathered bronze plate affixed to the door of a small mausoleum that stood by itself, set off from the rest of the cemetery by a rusting wrought-iron fence.
GEORGE CONWAY
BORN JULY 29, 1916
DIED JUNE 4, 1959
But how was that possible? Janet wondered. George Conway had committed suicide, hadn't he? Then how could he be buried here in sanctified ground? But when she saw the utter neglect the area around the mausoleum had suffered, she understood.
The ground upon which George Conway's mausoleum stood had been deconsecrated; the rusting fence had been erected not to protect the structure, but to shut it away from the rest of the cemetery, and all those who had died in a state of grace.
There was another crypt in the mausoleum, next to the one in which George Conway's body lay, and Janet assumed it had been George Conway's intention to have his wife buried there.