by Arjay Lewis
Then the series of deaths began.
On the day of the stock market crash, Elias Scudder jumped out of the front tower with a rope around his neck. His neck was broken in an instant, and the servants had to take the hanging corpse down.
His wife stayed in the house, but died within ten years. She grew more paranoid and less coherent with each passing season. The doctors ruled that Mrs. Scudder died of natural causes. But that didn’t explain why her eyes were open and wide, as huge as silver dollars, and the fact that her hair had turned stark white all at once.
A daughter moved in, a rather stern woman named Francis. She was the odd one of the family. It was rumored she was a lesbian and had several liaisons with other well-to-do women in the house.
Her death was also unique.
She was only in her fifties, but she died by leaping from the same tower her father had used and eviscerating herself by plunging onto one of the house’s decorative and quite sharp fence posts. She landed in such a way that it penetrated her through her sex and into her heart. The house made headlines yet again.
A brother then took up residence since there was a trust fund to maintain the house. He was, by all regards, the most normal of the Scudder family and did not commit suicide.
Instead, one night, his bed collapsed in a freak accident, and he was trapped by the mattress and pillow, which compressed against his face and head. He suffocated before anyone arrived to help.
His death was said to be caused by what was now referred to as “the Curse of Scudder House”.
The last resident, a cousin named Nat Hewing, moved into the house. He wanted to find a large, unaccounted for sum of money and valuables that were supposed to be hidden there. He sold off the furniture, the fixtures, and tried to disassemble the house brick by brick. For exactly two months.
When they found his body, it was burned beyond recognition. He may have been trying to burn the house down and instead set himself on fire. He was dead from the fire, and yet the house was not damaged in any way. Even the floor under his body was unmarked.
. . .
Fire rising up on his body, like Mishan, like Wendy.
I stopped dead. The steps seemed endless, and I was only up the first flight.
I considered why I was thinking about Scudder House. Could there be a correlation between it and this situation with Gingold?
Cold, the house was cold…
. . .
I walked into that house, which was still huge and grand even after years of emptiness and neglect. The estate’s land had been sold off over the years, except for the acres directly around the house. But as I rode in the car with Doctor Kohl up its cracked driveway, I couldn’t help feeling that the darkened windows with the tattered drapes watched me, expecting my visit.
I went into that house and did my best to keep my mind blank to all that was around me, although I felt the energy—the urgency—as it tried to reach out to me.
Doctor Kohl and I set up the equipment while there was daylight. We intended to work for a while and then vacate the house before dark.
I kept my mind focused on the tasks at hand, or on a wall—a white wall. Nothing in, nothing out, a solid barrier of my mind. But behind that wall, I could sense the buzzing of something, like the loud hum of a powerful machine. Is that when I began to call my hunches buzzes? I think so, because it was like a buzzing at the base of my skull, like a nest of bees had taken up residence there.
Then and there, I knew why Doctor Kohl spent months to teach me blocking techniques and made me practice the exercises over and over. He’d been correct, because I was wary of the unbidden perceptions that tried to force themselves on me. The years that followed the accident were filled with nights where I knew things I didn’t want to know and saw things I didn’t want to see.
When Doctor Kohl fired up our portable generator outside, and our equipment began to operate through the extension cords that snaked their way into the house, it was nearly sunset.
“All right, Leonard,” he said, touching the button on a digital recorder. “Ve can begin.”
By that time, I was wired to an electroencephalogram, the pads on my forehead reading my brain wave activity.
“I’ve only tried to be a medium a few times,” I said to him. I looked up at the high ceilings, the darkness of the woodwork, and the frayed remains of curtains hanging over the windows like a shroud. The room possessed a heaviness, a weight that seemed to press down on my shoulders and on the back of my mind.
“Don’t move, you vill schnap the vires!” Doctor Kohl said, a flash of humor in his eyes.
I breathed deeply and let the protective wall come down.
I remember nothing after that.
My first recollection is lying on the back seat of Doctor Kohl’s car as we raced away down the nighttime streets.
“What?” I said as if I came out of a dream. My head ached and my muscles were tight, like I’d escaped a straitjacket or done ten rounds with a famed fighter.
“Leonard, are you avake?”
“Water,” I said, my mouth so dry I couldn’t feel my tongue.
“There is bottled vater on the floor.”
I touched the floor of the vehicle until I feel the plastic container. I sat up, pulled off the cap, and began to gulp down the cool liquid.
“Do you know who you are?”
“That’s an odd question,” I said, my tongue feeling too large for my mouth.
“It is you! Tank Gott!” Doctor Kohl said, appearing greatly relieved. “Do you know vat happened?”
“The last thing I remember…we were beginning…” I stammered and lifted my hand, which now weighed two tons, to my head.
“Yah, that vas three hours ago. Come, I take you back to the hotel, away from that damn house.”
I leaned back and felt more tired and thirsty than I’d ever felt in my life. But even so, it was an odd experience to hear Doctor Kohl refer to any site of what he called “an experiment” as damned. His philosophy was that there are only phenomena, which are neither good or bad.
Except at Scudder House.
The next day in the hotel, there were six of us. Fritz had brought in Doctor Janis, a professor from the University of San Francisco. He was an expert on Scudder House and had arranged our excursion. With him were a female assistant and two young male students. They all assembled to hear the recording Doctor Kohl had made while we were in the house.
I was fully recovered after a good night’s sleep and able to listen to those digital recordings, but it was an odd experience. It was my voice, but I had no recollection of saying the words. On the recording, I kept changing my voice and timbre, as I appeared to jump from one persona to another, each with a different personality.
As the team reviewed what was said, reading the transcripts, we became aware that there were several mentions of hidden objects left by the former inhabitants.
“If ve could go through the house,” Doctor Kohl said, “If ve could find them, it vould be proof of consciousness surviving after death.”
So, as a five-man, one-woman team, we returned to Scudder House.
When I walked into that house again, the buzzing in my brain started again, but this time sounding like not just bees, but angry ones ready to strike.
“Whatever we do, we need to do it quickly,” I told Doctor Kohl.
He checked his notes and led our group. The others seemed unaffected, but my head ached as I fought to keep everything out.
We worked our way up to a bedroom on the second floor and wandered along the floor, noting any gaps in the floorboards. I’d spoken on the tape in a high, girlish voice about a lost cameo, even recounted which room and possible location. After just fifteen minutes of crawling on our hands and knees, one of the students gave a yell. He reached between the boards with a handy pair of tweezers and ext
racted the shiny object, then handed it to Doctor Janis.
“Lucy Scudder!” Doctor Janis said as he took it in his gloved hands and turned it over to note the inscription. “This is quite a find!” he added as he inserted it into a plastic bag.
“Let us see vat else ve can find,” Doctor Kohl said, as he glanced at his notes and then led us to the bedroom next door.
“You spoke of the molding in the corner being a hidey-hole,” Fritz said to me.
I nodded. “I heard the recording, but I don’t know where it is.” Yet I found I moved to the window, where there was a diagonal piece of trim at one end of the sill that pointed into the room.
Fritz’s eyebrows went up. “Is that it?”
“I don’t…I’m not sure,” I said, staring at the wood. I reached out and touched what looked like a nail that wasn’t hammered in all the way, and an entire section slid loose, coming out on a hinge.
One of the young men moved quickly in and extracted latex gloves from his pants. He put them on and carefully reached inside.
I got the briefest flash of a trap, something in there that would take off a finger or two, and reached out my own hand to grab his shoulder, and pull him away.
But he had found something and was pulling out a brown and silver object… all his fingers intact. I exhaled deeply as the others crowded around to look at his find.
“A revolver,” Doctor Janis said, as he examined it. “Nineteenth century, no doubt about it.”
“Remember that poem he said that mentioned another hiding place?” Doctor Kohl said, giving a quick glance out the window. It was about three in the afternoon, and we all wanted to be gone before dark.
“Can you play that one part again, Fritz?” Doctor Janis requested.
Doctor Kohl nodded, pulled out the small digital recorder, and pressed the play button. My voice spoke, once again making my skin crawl to hear this person who wasn’t me.
“In the lowest floor of all
You’ll find a space, and not a hall
Tenth row down, sixth one in
It is the place I hide my sin
Fifteen, thirty-eight, turned with stealth
Then twenty-one if you’d see my wealth”
“What does that mean?” the young woman, Cheryl, asked.
“Perhaps we could find out,” I said, and my legs pulled me toward the door. It was an odd, disjointed feeling because I didn’t want to see, I didn’t want to find out what this poem meant, but my legs moved as if with a mind of their own.
No, I thought, a mind other than my own.
The group followed me as I led them to the basement. Doctor Kohl turned on the light, and I hobbled down the ancient wooden stairs.
It was cold, the coldest part of the house. But the cold wasn’t just the air; it was like a living thing that chilled the blood and made the more sensible part of me want to run—and not look back.
The electric lights helped but couldn’t cut the gloom. The walls were a stone foundation, huge blocks of cut granite. Even here, there were curved arches of brick and decorative concrete and brick designs in the walls and floor as you went from room to room.
But the feeling of heaviness and sadness increased in this dark place shut away from the sunlight. My nerves yelled, “Get out, get out!”
“Can you play that one poem again, Fritz?” Doctor Janis said.
Doctor Kohl nodded and pushed the button. The poem repeated itself, the eerie voice coming through the tinny speaker.
“It’s no clearer down here than it was upstairs,” Cheryl said.
“The numbers sound like a combination,” one of the young men said. “Like for a locker.”
“There’s no locker down here or anything else with a lock,” Cheryl said.
“There are the legends of the hidden fortune that Nat Hewing was looking for.”
“Which he died for,” I said. I wondered why I was being led to find these things. In the past, those who tried hadn’t found anything and may have died in the attempt.
Propelled forward again, as if in answer to what I’d been thinking, I walked through an archway. There stood a brick wall at the far end of the room, which made me stop. All the other walls were granite, and this was the only brick wall that wasn’t a room divider or archway. There was nothing hanging on that wall, and nothing was stored or placed along it. I approached and ran my hand along the red rectangular masonry.
“Tenth row down,” I said as if I was in a dream. My hands tapped bricks, counting them. “And sixth one in.”
I pushed on the brick and heard a click.
It moved.
Suddenly, a part of the wall swung loose like a door. The entire group gasped, and I moved effortlessly to pull it aside to reveal a large, rectangular metal door. It appeared to be an old-fashioned bank vault.
“Oh my God!” Doctor Janis exclaimed eagerly. “This is what Nat Hewing was looking for!”
I walked to the vault door and started to turn the numbered wheel. It was cold—so cold—in my hand, like dry ice, and I pulled away as if I’d been burned.
“Are you all right, Leonard?” Doctor Kohl asked.
I nodded and reached out again, turning the dial right to fifteen, then left to thirty-eight, and finally right to twenty-one. When I pulled at the handle, it made a rusted click, and the door creaked open.
At that moment, I remembered a talk-show host who had received minimal amounts of fame for doing a live broadcast of the opening of Al Capone’s safe—it had been empty. I thought the same thing would happen here, which would be fine. All I wanted was to get out of that cellar and leave that house.
Doctor Janis pulled out a flashlight and shone it into the darkness behind the door. His light flickered back with a dazzling flash of gold.
As we all stood in stunned silence, we could see it was filled with shelves that held gold bullion in large heavy blocks of the glittering metal, bars of silver that were brown with tarnish, and stacks of currency from a different age.
Doctor Janis looked in and held everyone back. “Don’t touch anything. We must take pictures, document this.” He rapidly gave orders for his team, one to get a still camera, another a camcorder from the car. As they scurried off, he turned to Doctor Kohl and me.
“This is an amazing find,” he said, breathing heavily with excitement. “We always believed the vault was just a legend. I mean, if Elias Scudder had all this capital, why commit suicide the day after the stock market crash?”
That had nothing to do with it, flashed in my mind. And I knew it was true.
It was this house that had killed him.
Doctor Janis went in with an entire team over the next week and photographed, categorized, and put everything into a display he called The Lost Treasure of The Last Robber Baron. In his estimation, the discovery was equal to that of the discovery of King Tut’s tomb. With research, he found that the false wall had been so well built that even an architect or a master mason couldn’t have found it.
But I did. I’d tapped into the energy of a long-deceased man and was able to find evidence in the here and now. Janis credited me and Doctor Kohl with the discovery, and the news reports began to refer to me as the Super Psychic.
Another reason I decided to leave California.
Despite the publicity and the acclaim, I was unsatisfied. Although I possessed no recollection of the actual medium experience, I knew one fact that continued to bother me.
I didn’t finish the job.
“I didn’t make a difference,” I confessed to Doctor Kohl a few weeks after the experience, when reporters kept calling for interviews that I declined. “Whatever was there is still there. The consciousness that I touched is still trapped in that place.”
Fritz nodded, his white hair shaking in the loose shape I called an Einstein because it made my teacher resemble th
at famed scientist.
“Yah, Leonard,” he said. “But you are learning. You made a difference in how the vorld accepts vat you do. That vill have to be enough—for now.”
There was something in that house—something that led those people to their doom, drove them mad. It was still there, and I should have done something. But I wasn’t strong enough to take it on in its environment.
Or was I just too scared to try?
twenty-one
On the top landing, I realized that once again, I was scared. But if I didn’t push on, Jenny would suffer. It wasn’t just me or some trapped consciousness, but a friend who resembled the woman I’d once loved.
Cold—Scudder House was cold—and this man’s ability is fire. A cousin tried to burn down Scudder House—but the cold wouldn’t let him.
I focused my mind, trying to recall the chill I received at Scudder as I walked in the door of that famed house. The cold that seeped into my bones even on a warm day. I must have that cold on me, in me, right now.
I reached the door and bent to look at it. There was a small gap in the locking mechanism, just like the front door downstairs. If it was locked, I might be able to pry it open. At least then I would have a weapon in my hand. I held my cane tighter.
But when I turned the knob, it opened with a click.
Cold, I thought. I’m nothing but ice. A white wall made of ice.
I pushed the door open and stepped inside. I was in a wide hallway with faded light streaming in from an open door to the next room. It wasn’t much brighter than the dark stairwell, so my eyes didn’t need to adjust. There was a washing machine and a dryer on one side of the room and white shelving covered with Formica on the other. The shelving held cleaning liquids, canned foods, and supplies of every kind.
I stealthily crept forward.
He was near. I could all but smell him.
“Come in, Doctor Wise,” came a voice from beyond the end of the hall.