Arvida

  Fine. That’s all to say that where good judgment was concerned, my ex-wife was no smarter than a mouse. And as if to prove it, when I asked her that night, “You didn’t tell my stories about the house to the little one, did you?” she looked down at the ground as if to say, “You know I did.”

  There were some very strange things about the house, which I found once I got inside. Two things in particular, that would never have done so much harm, had my ex-wife not blabbed them to a little twelve-year-old girl who had an inordinate fondness for scary stories.

  The first week, after I’d signed the act of sale with the Villeneuve son, I took a stroll through the house. There was a horrible smell coming from the basement. The good woman Villeneuve didn’t seem to have ventured there very often. I went down the stairs and followed the smell to a padlocked door. I broke off the lock with a screwdriver. That room is where I have my workbench now. When I entered it for the first time, there was nothing there. It was a big cement room without even a naked bulb in the ceiling socket. The smell was dizzying and disgusting. I left to get my flashlight, and went back. I shone the light around until I saw something. There was a cat on the ground, dead for weeks, and eaten by vermin. I got rid of it the next day by peeling it off the ground with a shovel, and I had acid reflux when the body broke in two, letting thick liquid run onto the floor. I never found out what the cat was doing there. In theory, the room was hermetically sealed. Either someone had let it in and locked the door, or else, as cats do at times, it had got in through an improbable opening like a rift in the floor, then in poor condition, and wasn’t able to get out again.

  Not a big deal, anyway. The second thing I came on later, when I had to open up the attic on the third floor. I hadn’t inspected it the first time through because I didn’t even know there was a room there. I thought it was just lost space under the roof, but the architect I hired to redo the house found the original plans in the municipal archives. He said there was a room up there. His idea was to renovate the master bedroom upstairs by opening up the floor above it to add height, and gain access to the skylight he saw in the plan. Before starting his design he wanted me to confirm its existence.

  In a second-floor room, in the corner, there were two doors that you could easily mistake for cupboards. The second was one in fact, but the first opened onto a small staircase. At the top there was a solid oak door with a large lock on the outside. The key to open it was not on the key ring the Villeneuve son had given me. Nor anywhere else. I got out my chainsaw once more. It was too bad because it was a handsome door, but it was going to disappear in any case, given the architect’s plan. I was careful not to fall backwards into the stairway, and I cut a big square out of the door around the lock, which fell to the floor, so all I had to do was push.

  The room was just barely illuminated by the light from the opening in the roof. It was humid and musty. It also seemed to smell of pee. The floor was of barnwood, not maple, like in the rest of the house. There were two beds: a small single bed with drawers underneath, almost child size, and a Health Management Systems hospital bed with wooden uprights. There was also a chest of drawers with a little television on top, a wardrobe at the back, and on the right wall the opening for a dumbwaiter that communicated with the kitchen. On the descending walls of the dormered roof, there were posters: Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, and three ladies, boobs in the air. Even where it peaked, in the middle, the room was suffocating. Your instinct was to bend your neck so as not to bump the ceiling, which couldn’t have been more than seven feet at its highest point. In the middle of the room, between the two beds, there was a wheelchair.

  I couldn’t understand their putting a handicapped person’s room in such an out-of-the-way corner of the house, where it couldn’t have been an easy matter to enter and leave. It was as if the furniture was walled up in there, as well. I had to take the two beds apart to get them out.

  The armchair, the cupboard, and the chest of drawers just barely squeaked through. I kept the wardrobe, a lovely cherry wood piece, to refinish it, and all the rest I threw out. Except for the wheelchair, which I brought down to the basement, I don’t know why.

  Hardly anyone believes me, but under the standard bed someone had carved a symbol like this, with a knife, in the wooden floor:

  I didn’t want to start in with Villeneuve Junior or Madame in her old folks’ home, so instead I went to see Armand Sénécal.

  I hadn’t seen him for ages, and I’d been told that he was going all over town telling everyone he wasn’t overjoyed that I was the one who’d bought the Villeneuve house. He felt he’d been had. That’s not exactly the word he used, but never mind. I went to see him in his office downtown, we chewed each other out over it for a while, then I told him I hadn’t paid much more for the house than I’d advised him to put into it, and that I had a good ten years ahead of me to renovate it, just like I’d said. I was prepared to do it, he wasn’t, and nobody had screwed anyone. He said, “Okay, you’re right,” and then he asked me what I was doing there. I told him about the room in the attic, and then I asked him if he knew what the story was.

  Senecal said:

  “When Médéric Villeneuve handed down his house, it was on one condition. Whoever inherited it had to keep on there the two youngest sons in the family. The room at the top was set up for them, they were there during vacations, and then all year round when Médéric moved into the house permanently. There was about three years between them. Vallaire, the older one, was not handicapped, he was just weak in the head. Thibeau, the younger, had Andermann Syndrome. The Charlevoix sickness. After he was twelve or thirteen years old, he could no longer walk. His spine was all twisted with scoliosis, and he had epileptic seizures to boot. From what I heard, he was slow in some ways, for sure, but overall he was a bit more with it than his brother. It’s Viateur who took them on, and it’s Viateur who got the house. He paid a nurse to take care of them, but I think his wife and children helped out a lot, given that the inheritance was dwindling away. At the end, the nurse came only during the day, when they weren’t there. It was a big burden for a small family. Was there ever anything like that in yours?”

  “No. What happened to the brothers? They ended up being placed, I imagine?”

  “They’re dead.”

  He seemed ill at ease. He must have seen the expression on my face, not at all happy with the news, because he went on:

  “Not in your house. But not far away either, I have to say. Do you really not remember the story? It was in 1982, or maybe ’83.”

  “I was working in Montreal then.”

  “Yes, that’s right. Okay. One night when Viateur, his wife, and his children had gone off I don’t know where, and the nurse had left as well, the eldest took his little brother in his arms, and carried him down to the main floor. He put him in his wheelchair, pushed him outside, and down along the path that led to the old rock quarry. There was a place where the path turned sharply to the left because in front there was a drop of about a hundred feet leading to a cliff and then to the lake of rainwater that had built up at the bottom of the quarry. Once there, Villaire raised up the chair as though to unload a wheelbarrow, and tipped his brother over the edge. Vallaire then threw himself after him. When the adults got back they found the wheelchair sitting there, and the police retrieved the two brothers from the waterhole the following week. That wasn’t a sheer cliff. Their bodies had been torn apart on the rocks as they tumbled down. It seems that they were so mangled when they came out of the water that each body had to be pieced together in order to determine which one was the cripple.”

  A chill ran down my back. I told myself that I had absolutely to check out that path before Julie hurt herself, playing outside.

  “The worst thing about the story is that when you think about it a little, you can understand. Mario Leroux, the guy from the provincial police, talked to me about it one night when we were having a beer at
the Le Stade sports bar. He said, ‘You know, in that business, there were two problems. Vallaire Villeneuve didn’t have all his marbles, but he wasn’t crazy enough to do something like that. Thibeau wasn’t exactly an Olympic champion, but he wasn’t so paralyzed as to have that done to him without at least trying to throw himself to the ground, or something. We didn’t tell the papers what we really thought, because we didn’t want to hurt anybody. Our conclusion was based on the fact that people with Andermann Syndrome tend to go psychotic. If you ask me, it’s Thibeau, who couldn’t walk, who convinced his big brother to perform the act. Can you imagine?’”

  I could imagine very well. I thanked Armand for the fascinating story, and above all for not having told it to me before. I went home, I pulled the wheelchair out of the basement, and took it right to the dump. The following Sunday I drove to Potvin & Bouchard, to the lumberyard. Back home, I was able to find the old path without clearing it out, I made my way down to the drop-off, I tried not to look at the waterhole staring back at me like a cadaver’s eye, and I spent all day building a barrier that’s still there, intact.

  All that doesn’t make for a haunted house. No point losing your head over it. It’s horrible enough, but the truth is that going back into the brothers’ room that night after having made the barricade, I just felt very sad. I thought about their life in that room. A nothing life, so small in scale that it could make you want to execute a grand, insignificant suicide. I don’t know. Along the grapevine it must certainly have seemed a fearful tale, but for me the lives of Vallaire and Thibeau Villeneuve amounted first and foremost to a very sad story. Over the following weeks I took apart the brothers’ room under the eaves, and I sent all the wood to the dump. I don’t know who Vallaire and Thibeau wanted to hex, carving the devil’s sign into the floor, but now the curse is someone else’s business.

  I was smart enough not to tell the whole story to my ex-wife. When we moved in, all she knew about was the old room and the marks on the floor. That was enough to impress the little one, but at least it wasn’t the Stephen King novel cover to cover.

  I let two days go by, and then I went to talk to Julie one night, before she went to bed. I was gentle and I tried to reassure her. She asked me if I wanted to see her big notebook. I said “Yes, my lovely.” In a Canada notebook, for at least six months, she’d been keeping track of all the strange things going on in the house:

  > The dates and hours when her little dog Mélodie yapped for no good reason; she who’d howled all the goddam day ever since we’d got her, long before moving in here. Who howled at the clock, at noises in the street, at squirrels, at her shadow.

  > The dates and hours when there was mysterious knocking in the house, from inside the walls; knocking that was no mystery, since some of the plumbing dated from before the war—the First War, I mean to say.

  > Sketches indicating the before and after locations of objects that had shifted position in the house. The list included things like the car keys on the table and winter boots in the hall, and I had to stop myself from telling Julie that I knew the cleaning woman was a ghost.

  > Entries dated, but with no time, such as I felt a presence in the TV room, or as if to enrage me even more, Mama says she was pushed by a force and almost fell downstairs. That was dated the Saturday before, when the poltergeist had been able to capitalize on the fact that Danièle was drunk as a skunk after Alain Laganière and his wife had come to have dinner and play cards.

  And so on and so forth. For pages and pages.

  Most of the entries gave the dates and hours when doors had slammed in the middle of the night. I remember being afraid for her and feeling sorry for her. Poor Julie. Poor us. I remember taking her in my arms like when she was little, and rocking her for a long time. Perhaps I should have come clean then and there, but I decided to let things go.

  There were so many slammed doors in those days that it couldn’t hurt to blame two or three of them on ghosts.

  After that things were better, things were worse, but they were never good any more. My wife and her friend Louise hired some clown with a moustache to purify the house: he walked all over mumbling in some bizarre language, and burning cheap incense. My daughter kept on adding to her notebook, but she didn’t have any more night sweats, and I suspected her of having begun to draw attention to herself at school with all that stuff. My wife, as she did with anything and everything, used the negative energy on the loose in our household as a pretext to spend money. She had to regain control of the house, she said, and to do so for the family. In practice that meant unloading vast sums onto her decorator friend, buying mountains of knick-knacks and trinkets every day, ordering lamps and furniture from the ends of the earth, then spending almost fifteen thousand bucks to have a made-to-measure feng shui bed built for our room, wide as two king beds, so wide in fact that there was no way we could come into contact except by making a special effort.

  The little one thought the house had destroyed our marriage. Danièle must have thought so too because she never disputed anyone who had a stupid idea. But the truth was that it was all over long before we got here. I’ll never tell her, but we were done as soon as Julie was born. Everything that wasn’t working between us got even worse after that. Danièle was crazy and I was drinking. She liked to take a nip herself, mind you, and I wasn’t totally sane either. I suppose we’d be able to admit as much separately today, but certainly not face to face.

  After the little one was born, sleeping with my wife became a long-term project. One that never cost me less than a couple of hundred bucks. Danièle began to fear for everything, for herself and for the little one, all the time. Nothing I did made any sense to her. We also had a different way of dealing with the fact that the business was doing well and I was making money. She came from a small village where she’d always held her own because of her beauty, and now she loved playing the parvenu, looking down her nose at her brothers and sisters, all of whom hated me because I’d turned her into a snob. But I came from the lower town, where you can get hammered for lots of reasons, but never harder than for a swelled head. I like paying for a round and buying big cars, but never in a hundred years would I go on about it, talking with my mouth all puckered up as did my wife, who came off as a real turkey, articulating like a countess with her three-hundred-word vocabulary.

  I suppose it was partly my fault, because I spoiled her. I always liked letting her spend money so people could see what I had without my needing to make a big deal of it myself. When Julie was born, I had the same reflex as lots of workers’ sons: I wanted to close the floodgates so my daughter wouldn’t be the most coddled baby in the world. So she wouldn’t turn into a rich kid I couldn’t even talk to. I don’t know. All I know is that there was no way I could raise my daughter old-style with her mother taking herself for Empress Sisi right alongside. But there, at least, things worked out. She’s tough today, my daughter. She earns her own money and she’s not scared of anyone, but I’m not liar enough to say it’s thanks to me.

  By the time we moved into the house, things had already gone sour. We made love about ten times a year. I tried to reconcile myself to that because we’d almost divorced in 1987 after my affair with a secretary. So I drank a lot, and yes, I was in a foul humour most of the time. Since Danièle was afraid of everything, and refused to go for counselling and said it was me who was crazy and irresponsible, the only place to spend our money was at the shopping centre. We didn’t travel any more because every country in the world was too dangerous for the little one—except for the States and Walt Disney World, which a normal guy soon gets tired of visiting. It was a real problem going to a restaurant because my wife ate nothing and was always scared that the people in the kitchen had left the chicken on the counter more than five minutes, or touched the meat with their bare hands. I tried to start a wine collection but she said it was stupid to pay fifty bucks for bottles that really aren’t any better than those you
can get for ten, and anyway it was just another reason to get drunk.

  Danièle babied our daughter and you couldn’t talk to her about it without her jumping all over you. She overprotected her and spoiled her and at the same time overexposed her by telling her all sorts of nonsense about men in general and me in particular. At one point she was reading another one of her ladies’ books: The Manipulators Are Among Us. She made a point of leaving it all over the house with a big bookmark sticking out of it. One afternoon I picked it up and opened it to the page she’d marked. It was the list of “what makes a manipulator”:

  He makes other people feel guilty in the name of family ties, friendship, love, professionalism;

  He holds others responsible, and not himself;

  He does not clearly communicate his demands, his needs, his feelings and opinions;

  He often gives vague answers;

  He alters his opinions, his behaviour, his feelings, to suit different people and situations;

  He draws on logic to disguise his own demands;

  He makes others believe they must be perfect, must never change their minds, must know about everything, and must respond instantly to his demands and queries;

  He calls into question the qualities, competence, character of others: he criticizes without appearing to, puts people down and judges them;

  He sends messages via other individuals;

  He sows discord and creates suspicion, divides to conquer;

  He knows how to portray himself as a victim in order to attract sympathy;

  He ignores requests even if he claims to be dealing with them;

  He enlists the moral principles of others to satisfy his own needs;

  He uses veiled threats, or overt blackmail;

  He abruptly changes the subject in the midst of a conversation;

  He avoids or walks out on conversations and meetings;