Houses Without Doors

by Peter Straub

  The face was sunken and unhealthy, with prominent knobs of bone above the eye sockets, and the man’s shoulders had a decided stoop. He was smiling—smiling in ecstasy. It was Chester Ridgeley, some ten or eleven years older than when Mr. and Mrs. Standish, William and Jean, had left the serpent-infested Eden of Popham College in the town of Popham.

  But there was no Mrs. Chester Ridgeley.

  The woman beside the old scholar had turned away from the camera into the shade of a deformed oak. She appeared to be in her mid-thirties, strong of body, square-shouldered, with the sort of inherent self-sustaining physical confidence with which even otherwise ordinary women are sometimes blessed, and which makes them anything but ordinary. Ridgeley held her hand trapped between his two old hands.

  It was her because it had to be her. It was her because it could be no one else.

  Standish went down the row of photographs and peered at each couple. The men, he guessed, were all academics— Esswood Fellows. The woman was always the same woman, always with the same air of physical confidence in the set of her shoulders, the carriage of her arms, the balance of her hips. In the fifty or sixty years represented by the photographs,- she had not aged ten. When she had opened the door of Esswood House to him, she had appeared a strikingly youthful forty.

  Standish stepped away from the photographs, aware for a moment that he was half-naked, dirty, out of breath, bleeding from many small cuts and abrasions, that he stank.…

  He turned from the photographs and stared down at the drain in the center of the floor. He wondered if Ridgeley had ever returned to Popham. Had they received a telegram announcing his retirement? A letter declaring his intention to devote the remainder of his life to research on the life of that absolutely inessential literary figure, Theodore Corn?

  I feel certain that you will understand my excitement at having made many discoveries here, also my unwillingness to sacrifice my remaining years to classroom lecturing when so much (and so much, also, in the personal sense) remains to be done.…

  Standish left Isobel’s ultimate room. Little bodies scurried here and there in the room stacked with old newspapers. He leaned in, and all motion ceased. Standish looked down at the copy of the Yorkshire Post and its blaring headline, then lowered himself onto his sore knees and flipped the newspaper over and stared at the photographs he knew would be there.

  But these photographs, of a burly publican with a face like a thrown rock, a hard-faced woman with high bleached hair, and a weak-chinned lover, were of strangers. Tock tock tock went the mechanical mirthless laughter. He forced himself up on his feet and looked down again at the meaningless faces.

  A puzzling gap in experience, a piece of experience missing from the universe—a loss for which the universe yearned, ached, grieved without awareness of its suffering—went with Standish as he wandered with his axe beneath Esswood. He came to a modest set of stairs going upward to an open arch, and carried his axe up into the known world.

  He passed through the arch and found himself at the back of “his” staircase, in “his” secret corridor that had been IsobeFs. He walked down the hall to the dining room and opened the door. The smell of his cooling lunch was faintly nauseating. He went to the table and pulled the open bottle of white wine from the bucket. Then he carried the dripping bottle down the corridor.

  The library seemed larger, lighter, even more beautiful than on the night “Robert Wall” had first shown it to him. The long peach carpet glowed, and the alabaster pillars stood like sentinels before the ranks of books.

  Standish swigged from the bottle, then looked at the label. Another 1935 Haut-Brion, ho hum. He swigged again, and winked at Great-great-great-great-grandfather. He set the bottle on the desk and carried the axe across the shimmering room into the first recess. Here were the broad file boxes stamped standish and woolf and Lawrence, all the names which had been the lures for the men whose photographs hung in the ultimate room. He had been right, his first day in the library, when he had imagined “Robert Wall” drinking blood from these fat containers.

  Standish raised his axe and smashed open the second of Isobel’s file boxes. A tide of yellowing paper spilled from the ruptured box and splashed on the floor. Standish swung his axe again, and the blister on his hand screamed like a child. Papers fluttered around him like birds. He drove the axe into the third standish box, and instead of disintegrating into a shower of handwritten pages, the box slid along the shelf until it slammed into a wooden upright. Standish wriggled the axe out of the cardboard, and the box spilled off the shelf, dumping small square photographs to the ground like confetti.

  Grunting with surprise, Standish bent down and picked up a handful of the photographs. And here, in the first photograph, was the image of a tall, intense-looking woman in a pale dress and close-fitting hat standing on the path beside the long pond. Standish knew that the dress was green, though the seventy-year-old photograph was black and white; and he knew the woman’s face, in the photograph no more than a blur, had the long chin and narrow nose he had already seen. Here was Isobel at the chair in the library, here she was reading a fat book in the West Hall, here Isobel stood beside a rotund openmouthed man whom Standish eventually recognized as Ford Maddox Ford. Standish tossed the photographs aside and grabbed another handful from the smashed file box. Isobel posed uncomfortably beside an equally uncomfortable T. S. Eliot. Isobel with a sleek dark-haired man who might have been Eddie Marsh; Isobel in the far field, trying to look pastoral; Isobel holding a drinks tray—serving cocktails—and smiling ruefully. The poor mutt.

  Standish struck the box with his axe once more, and photographs flew all around him. Then he took aim at james, and cracked the first one like a nut with one blow of the axe. Wads of loose paper cascaded out, and he kicked them apart.

  He drove the axe into the second box of James’ papers, and into the third, and then drove it down into the papers themselves and cut a great wad of them in half. Monuments of unaging intellect, Standish thought, and drove the axe into woolf. Then into the next file box, and the next, and the next, until every one had been smashed open and its contents spilled on the floor. After that he dragged the axe across the library to the second recess and started with forster and brooke—ugh, how did he get invited?—and came to CORN.

  Standish grinned at the thought of Theodore Corn. He smashed open the box. A few sheafs of paper flew out—Theodore Corn would of course have sheafs of paper, preferably slender sheafs—along with another gout of small square photographs.

  The photographs hit the already impressive drift of papers on the floor with the clatter of falling insects. Standish bent down to pick up a random handful, assuming he would see more photographs of lumpy literary people.

  They were strikingly like the photographs of Isobel. I should have let this idiot’s box alone, Standish said to himself, feeling a premonitory tingle. He turned over various small squares of paper that had been printed with the same scant margins, the same dingy range of tones from sepia to light gray, and the same landscapes and furniture of Isobel’s pictures. Many of the faces too were also in Isobel’s photographs—Ford breathing through his mouth, Eliot hunching and making a face like a cat. The principal figure in this set of images was in some ways Isobel’s male counterpart. A tall skinny figure in wrinkled suits, wearing unbuttoned shirts with flyaway collars, sometimes in a sleeveless Fair Isle pullover too small for him, he looked at the camera with a long lopsided rural face seamed and picked by childhood diseases, adolescent acne, and a long attachment to alcohol. His left front tooth and incisor were missing, and his hands, twice the size of Standish’s own, had joints like bolts.

  What had reminded Standish of Isobel was none of this, but the man’s air of aggrieved disappointment—the sense of having been cheated lifted from the photograph like an odor. Coarser than Isobel, he was just as embittered. His sly drunken face proclaimed / deserve more, I need more. Standish detested him even before he realized who he had to be, and then recognize
d that he detested him because he recognized himself in the man. If this person were an American of the 1980s instead of an Englishman of seventy years before, he might be married to someone like Jean Standish and be teaching in some dead Midwestern Zenith. He would dress better and a crown would fill the gap in his mouth. He would profess the Nineteenth-century Novel, not very well but at least as well as William Standish.

  Standish flipped over another of the dark little photographs and saw the man leaning against the back of Esswood House with a leer spread across his gappy mouth and a scarf tied around his neck like a rope.

  He was, of course, Chester Ridgeley’s darling, Theodore Corn.

  Then Standish realized that he knew one more piece of the puzzle—Isobel had taken these photographs, just as Corn had taken all the photographs of Isobel.

  And this led to the final fact, as Isobel might have said the ultimate fact, which had prompted Standish’s sense of foreboding when he had seen photographs spilling from Corn’s box. The ninny Corn was the man Isobel had met at Esswood. Theodore Corn was her vagrant, her scholar-gipsy. He had been the father of her lost child.

  Standish held the loose wad of photographs in his hands for a moment entirely empty of thought or feeling. He let them drop, and they clattered onto the strewn papers. Standish kicked at the mess on the floor. Everything about him seemed meaningless and dead. The meaninglessness was worse than death, because the meaninglessness existed at the center of a mystery, like the whorls of a beautiful pink and ivory shell that wound deeper and deeper into the glowing interior until they came to—nothing.

  Theodore Corn looked up at him from a hundred photographs, sly and hayseed and unknowable.

  Standish waded through the ruck of papers and smashed the axe into pound. Another mass of papers flew up from a shattered box and fell, thick as leaves, to the ground. He saw Isobel seated beside Theodore Corn at the dinner table, gazing at him over the golden rim of her wineglass. He swung his axe and demolished another box.

  Eventually Standish waded out of the second recess and went to the desk. The original file still sat beside the red gilt chair. Atop the desk stood the bottle of Haut-Brion. Standish looked down at Isobel’s poor papers and considered carrying them over the recess and tossing them on the pile. He nudged the papers with his foot and watched them spill sideways, exposing lines and sentences of Isobel’s busy handwriting. That was good: that was better. Now the sentences could lift off the page and escape into the sky.

  Standish put the bottle to his mouth and drank. He examined the library impartially and found it beautiful. He looked up, and the god glared down at him, pointed his ineffectual finger. The god was made entirely of paint a fraction of an inch thick, and that the finger came forward to point was an illusion created by a man named Robert Adam, who had loved great houses and fine libraries. Standish hefted the axe in his hands. He raised it and let it fall on the desk. The axe cracked its top open. Objects Standish had not noticed, Bic pens

  and legal pads, fell into the desk. Other insignificant things went sailing into the library.

  Late afternoon sun came streaming through the windows.

  Standish dropped the axe and saw blood spatter onto the carpet. The carpet instantly drank the blood, shrinking the red spots and hollowing them into pale pink rings almost invisible against the peach.

  As hungry as the house, his stomach growled.

  Standish thought for a moment, then smiled and sat at the ruined desk. He found a pen nestled beside long polished splinters. He wrote matches on a legal pad. Then he tore the sheet off the pad and wobbled toward the door.

  ——

  In the dining room the table was set for dinner. An open bottle of red wine stood on the tablecloth. Standish’s mouth felt as if he had been eating ashes, and he filled the gold-rimmed glass to the top and gulped several mouthfuls before he bothered to look at the label. 1916 La Tache. It could have been the year Isobel returned to the Land, in search of immortality and the greedy embraces of Theodore Corn. What else had Isobel been looking for in 1916, in the midst of a world-engulfing war? The final curve inside the pink shell, the story inside the story, the new sentence, the source of the sound. Standish’s hand slowly dripped blood on the tablecloth, and the tablecloth sucked the drops to pale circles. He smiled, and set down the glass to wrap his right hand in one of Esswood’s broad linen napkins. Then he sat and lifted the golden cover. Isobel’s meal steamed on the golden plate.

  Standish ate. The room tilted to his left, then to his right. His whole body ached. Eventually his eyelids insisted on coming down over his eyes, and he lowered his head to the table and slept. In the midst of a grove of trees a shining baby lifted its arms and tilted up its head for a kiss. Standish stretched out his torn arms, but his feet were caught in thick silken grass like ropes. Blood dripped from the palms of his hands, and the shining baby turned its face away and cried.

  Standish too wept, and woke up with his wet face cradled in the bloody napkin wound around his hand. “Oh, god,” he said, imagining that he had to go back to the library and write a book about Isobel. A tide of relief radiated out from the memory of what he had done in the library.

  He wiped his face and stood up. The axe lay beside his chair like a sleeping pet, and he carefully knelt and reached for the handle. It glided into his hand and fitted itself into the folds of the napkin.

  Standish dragged himself down Isobel’s secret corridor to the library. He toiled through the great empty space and opened the main door. On the carpet of the West Hall lay a large yellow box of Swan kitchen matches.

  Standish carried the matches back into the library, leaned the axe against a column, and went to the second recess. He pushed open the box, and an astonishing number of matches fell out into the heap of papers and photographs. He stared stupidly at the box for a moment before realizing that it was upside down. He turned it over and saw that the other, uncovered end of the box still contained hundreds of matches. Standish removed one and scratched the head against the crosshatched strip. The match exploded into bright flame.

  He bent down and touched the flame to the corner of a piece of paper. As soon as the paper ignited, he moved the match to another sheet. Then he tossed the burning match far back into the recess. A thin wire of smoke ascended, and a curl of fire followed it.

  Standish backed out of the recess and watched the flames eat at the papers. The paint on the bookshelves blackened and burst into circular blisters just before the fire jumped to take the wood beneath the paint. Then he crossed the library to set the papers in the other recess alight.

  He dropped the rest of the matches on the floor and left by the main doors. He had more than enough time to do what had to be done next.

  Standish went out into the entrance hall. An ornate clock on a marble table told him that it was five minutes to ten. He wandered down the screened passage and tugged at the front door. Velvet darkness began at the edge of the light that spilled from the house. The trees beyond the drive were a solid wall reaching from the dark ground to the vivid purple of the sky. Overhead were more stars than Standish could ever remember seeing, millions it seemed, some bright and constant and others dim and flickering, in one vast unreadable pattern that extended far back into the vault of the sky, like a sentence in a foreign language, the new sentence that went on and on until first the letters and then whole words became too small to read.

  Standish walked out to stand beneath the great sentence. All of that writing in the library, the pages stuffed with words like bodies stuffed with food, would float upward to join the ultimate Esswood that was the sentence in the sky. Beyond it, invisibly, did an angered god point a finger from a whirling cloud?

  Standish carried his axe back into the house.

  EIGHTEEN

  As he went up the stairs he caught the faint odor of burning, but when he turned off to the left into unfamiliar territory the faraway smell of smoke faded into the odors of old leather and furniture polish and the fresh ev
ening air that entered the house through open windows. He passed under an arch at the top of the left-hand wing of the staircase and went into a room that was the larger counterpart of the Study on the other end of the house.

  A light fixture hung from the central rosette. Empty bookshelves covered two of the walls. A single rocking chair had been pushed up against a bare wall with pale rectangles where pictures had hung.

  At the far end of the empty room was another arch through which Standish could see a bleak corridor. A bare light bulb dangled from a cord. Dust gathered on the floorboards, and cracks ran across the plaster walls. Two large windows with brown shades stood on one side of the hallway, two dusty brown doors on the other.

  These were the windows he had seen from the Inner Gallery and the Fountain Rooms. He tugged on the ring of a window shade and gently released it upward. Across the dark courtyard his old windows glowed yellow around the outline of a misshapen child-sized figure peering out. Standish froze. Inch-Me or Pinch-Me or Beckon-Me-Hither stared at him, and Standish stared back. Then the small featureless shape disappeared. A gray whorl of smoke moved into the frame of the window. Standish imagined the secret stairs filling with smoke dense enough to push back at you if you tried to move through it. Another, deeper rift of smoke appeared in his window.