by Melanie Tem
“See how much better the house looks,” he said. “It’ll be happier this way.”
“It?”
“Sure. The house needs things.” She desperately wished he would smile. He used to give her a playful smile when he talked like this. “Just as you and I need things.”
“But what do you need right now, Perry? Your painting …”
He cut her off with a wave of his hand. “I’m doing fine. Just let me finish a few more things around here.”
One day when Hannah came home from work she found him up on a ladder repainting the eaves a glossy black.
“Why are you doing that now? Can’t it wait till summer?”
“It has to be done sometime,” he said between clenched teeth. Hannah realized she was afraid to talk to him; he’d seemed to be angry with her all the time lately. But she wanted to make him stop; she wanted him to be happy.
“I really don’t mind if you’d like to do that later, Perry. I don’t think it’s a high priority.”
He jerked his head around so suddenly she was terrified he’d fall. The ladder rocked, and he grabbed at the soffit. She saw that his feet were on the step above the little sign that said: danger: do not stand above this step. She wanted to make him stop, but he was glaring at her, and she backed off.
Perry had always been terrified of heights. She didn’t understand.
Every time they had an argument Hannah waited for Perry to say, “I don’t love you,” or “I’m leaving.” He never did. He said he never would.
She woke up in the middle of the night. She felt around the edges of their bed in the darkness. Alone. She got up quickly and almost stumbled out the door. “Perry,” she whispered. She could hear Ashley snoring lightly from across the hall. It was pitch-dark in the hallway; there wasn’t a light fixture there, and Hannah was afraid that Ashley would tumble down the stairs. But she was more afraid of asking Perry to do something else to the house.
The odd narrowness of the second-floor windows and the thick, lens-like ornamental panes did strange things to the light from the streetlamps. The shadow of her flowing gown rippled the flocked wallpaper, as if she were passing through a distortion in the architecture of the house. “Perry.” The whisper would not carry.
Every old house has noises—in their previous home they could hear almost everything that happened anywhere in the house—but this one seemed to have far fewer than most. There was a hush in this house. There was the sound of the huge forced-air gas furnace coming on, and the pipes creaking as the dust inside them slowly heated up. But nothing else. She couldn’t even hear her own footsteps because of the thick carpeting in the hallway. Sound did not carry in the house, and she had liked that. Even the real estate agent had commented on it.
But now that feature disturbed her. As if the house were suppressing even the smallest of disturbances. Hannah didn’t think she liked that very much, the house holding things down, muffling her family. She wanted to know where Perry was right now. And this house wouldn’t let her hear him.
When she reached the end of the hall, she saw the sliver of light under Perry’s studio door. He hadn’t been in there since they’d moved. He hadn’t even made the improvements he needed in order to paint. The light was inadequate, there was only one outlet, and he hadn’t yet built the cabinet for storing his paints. When she’d told him she thought he should make the studio his first priority, he’d just shrugged it off. “I’ll get to it,” he said. They’d been using it as a storage room; boxes were stacked shoulder-high.
When she opened the door he was sitting before his easel, jammed between walls of boxes. She felt a momentary elation, until she noticed that he was cutting long slits in the canvas with a utility knife.
“Perry?”
He stared at the canvas, jabbing at it playfully with the knife.
She came to his side. From what she could see between the numerous vertical tears and holes he had made, it was a dark, smudged canvas, with a streak of red near the middle. Incredibly amateurish; Hannah had never known him to paint so badly.
“Perry, what are you doing?”
He looked at her. She was sure he hadn’t had those lines in his face before. “Playing. Just playing.” He looked at the knife. “You know … I want to paint, Hannah. I need to paint.”
“I know.” She touched his shoulders. They were trembling.
“But I can’t. Something’s not right, and I don’t know what it is. I do everything I can think of, but I can’t seem to make it right. I can’t paint, Hannah.”
“It’s just a bad spell. It’ll get better. You’ll see. You paint very well, you know that.”
“It’s never been this bad.” He looked back up at her. “Sometimes you want something so bad you poison it. It’s like you haunt it, drive it crazy, make it something cheap and negative, and it’s never the same again. I’m …” He looked down at his hands, the hands that Hannah so dearly loved. He was holding the knife. For a moment she was afraid he might cut those, too. “I’m not making any sense.”
Hannah looked around at the shabby room, dim and filled with boxes, and tried to imagine the rest of the house beyond it, her wonderful dream house. No clear images came. She rubbed Perry’s shoulders. “No, you make perfect sense,” she finally said. And wondered wearily what they were talking about.
Every night Hannah came home from work exhausted from the senseless task of trying to make sense out of things. The house welcomed her, and her relief at coming home to it approached a lover’s passion. The longer she lived there the better she came to understand its little idiosyncrasies: The front gate opened easily now to let her in, but stuck the other way as if reluctant to let her out. She didn’t dare mention it to Perry. He would fix it, and she didn’t want him to. She was beginning to think they shouldn’t be imposing their will on this house.
Ashley had become an obsessive housekeeper. She was forever polishing the wooden floors, vacuuming the red-carpeted stairs, scurrying to pick up the smallest bit of litter in the yard. They’d figured out that her room, fittingly—the small back bedroom at the top of the narrow winding stairs that the realtor had called “the servants’ stairway”—had probably been the maid’s room.
When Hannah caught her in the midst of a flurry of housekeeping and pulled her into her lap, Ashley wouldn’t look at her. She fidgeted, played with her hair, even struggled to get down. That wasn’t like her. It worried Hannah, made her angry, and she pressed. “Ashley, what’s all this about? You’ve been acting strange since we moved. Don’t you like our new house?”
Ashley’s eyes widened in surprise. Seen from the side, they seemed to bulge a little. “I love our house!” she protested. “I love it just the way it is!”
“Then what’s going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Ashley.” Hannah felt a sudden flash of anger, almost rage. Her hands tightened around the child’s upper arms until she was sure it hurt, but Ashley didn’t flinch, and she, to her own dismay, didn’t loosen her grip. Instead she shook the girl, until Ashley’s small head lolled. “Tell me what’s wrong.”
Abruptly Ashley turned to her and cried, “Mommy, our house is haunted and I can’t find the ghosts!”
Hannah caught her breath. In that split second of laxness her daughter slid out of her lap and ran hysterically up the steps, slamming the door to her room. It was a very muffled sound, without echoes.
“I’ll bet there’s a secret passageway somewhere in this house,” the realtor had told them. At the time, knowing it was part of the sales pitch and completely unnecessary, Hannah hadn’t taken it seriously. But there were signs. The house had been remodeled many times—Perry discovered the evidence everywhere. Too many times to suit Hannah.
Beside the basement stairs was a cubbyhole that extended three feet back under the foundation for no apparent reason and then just stopped. In a dark recessed corner of the laundry room Perry had come upon a thin false wall with a tall, empty space behind it.
Under the flowered rug in Ashley’s room was a sealed trapdoor. Its edges were so neatly nailed and painted that it was almost indiscernible, but Ashley had discovered it and hadn’t told anybody until Hannah noticed the uneven way she’d replaced the rug. Even then she’d lied, insisting fearfully that she knew nothing about it. Finally Hannah—who abhorred physical violence and had never used it with her child—spanked her, and then Ashley confessed. “I was looking for the ghosts!” she sobbed. “I thought maybe the ghosts lived down there!”
Frustrated, guilt-ridden, Hannah had shouted at her: “Now you listen to me! There’s no such thing as ghosts!” But Ashley, of course, did not believe her, and would not take comfort in her arms.
She’d hardly seen Perry for several days. He was up before she was, off somewhere making God knew what alterations to their house. And he was up long after her, working at this or that. She never could figure out exactly what, and was afraid to ask. He made almost no noise, no more than the noises the house might normally make by itself: the creakings, the tiny scrapes, the soft and distant thuds, the resettlings. She sat up in bed sometimes, late into the night, listening for him, trying to distinguish his sounds from the house sounds. Sometimes she’d wake up suddenly in the middle of the night, as if something had awakened her, and find him missing from the bed. Then she’d try to hear the sound that had awakened her from sleep, the sound that might have been him working in the house somewhere, changing their house, altering it until it no longer resembled the house she had coveted so long, her dream house. But that telling sound was no longer present. It had disappeared, just as Perry had seemed to disappear, somewhere into the too-vast shadowed corners of the house.
When Perry did come down for meals, he came reluctantly, obviously displeased by the interruption. He’d serve himself in silence and then stare glumly at his food. His agent had called three times asking about commissioned works. Hannah had taken the calls because she couldn’t find Perry in the house. The first time, she spoke to him about it, but he yelled at her to mind her own business, and after that she left him notes, which he did not acknowledge.
Now she could hear Perry coming down the main staircase for dinner, almost half an hour after everyone else had sat down. The third message from his agent was by the telephone in the hall. She glanced at Ashley, who looked tense and drawn, jabbing at her food with a fork that trembled visibly. The child knew everything. Hannah’s heart went out to her. It was all too much. This life wasn’t safe enough for her little girl, and she couldn’t make it better.
Something slammed into the wall out in the hall. Ashley jumped as if struck, crying. A face so pale Hannah barely recognized it appeared at the dining room door. The eyes were pinkish, the hair dark and flat against the skull-darker than it should have been, as if filthy with the dust of ages.
“I can’t eat today, Hannah,” Perry said.
“Don’t worry about your agent,” Hannah began. “I’ll—”
“You won’t do anything,” he said coldly. “I just can’t eat today!”
There was almost a growl in his voice. Hannah looked immediately at Ashley, who was sobbing now. And suddenly Hannah felt an uncontrollable anger as well. “Don’t do it, Perry. Not now!”
“I’ve got work!”
“You have to eat! Look at you!”
Hannah saw Perry draw back his fist and thought he was going to strike her for the first time. He was going to beat her, maybe go on beating her until he had killed her. Perry, who had been visibly shaken when Ashley had a mere touch of fever.
But the fist struck the dining room wall instead, several times, sending plaster and torn wallpaper cascading to the floor. Hannah thought the fist seemed to float in the air by itself, as if it had nothing to do with Perry. She felt drunk or drugged. She wondered if she might be hallucinating.
Ashley was on her feet, screaming. If it had not taken Hannah a few moments to grasp what was happening, she might have taken her beautiful little girl, her dream child, into her arms right then, comforted her, calmed her down, made her safe again. Stopped the worst from happening.
Ashley was hysterical. “You’ve hurt the house! First you changed it so it’s not the same anymore! Now you’ve hurt it!”
“Ashley, honey …” Hannah felt herself pull out of the chair.
“You’ve done it, too! You’ve poisoned things, Mommy!”
Hannah stopped, rigid. Her hand was out to her daughter, but Ashley was already running toward the stairs. Hannah glanced at Perry—something had broken in his face, and he was looking at her, and she knew that her husband was back with them for a time.
But what about Ashley?
“Ashley! Darling, it’s all right now!”
But Ashley didn’t answer. Perry looked panic-stricken. “Listen!” he said.
Door after door closed upstairs, one after another as if following the progression of Ashley’s flight, her escape into the safety of the house. Finally the slamming stopped, but not before Hannah realized that there had been far more slams than there were doors in the house.
She couldn’t find Ashley. She wandered through the house day after day, like a wraith herself, looking in all the hidden places she knew, trying to imagine if there were more. Perry was desperate, and blaming himself the way the old Perry would have, tearing out all his improvements, trying to find the extra doors they had both heard that day. He was convinced he had accidentally covered some of them up in his remodeling, and yet Ashley had still found a way through to the original house.
Hannah lifted the rug in the child’s room and dug at the edges of the old trapdoor with a putty knife and a screwdriver, but it was still wedged tight. She went outside, into the gray night air of the city that was never still, and called her daughter’s name. Her voice echoed against the walls of the house and stopped.
Sometimes at night Hannah would awaken, and again Perry would be gone from their bed. But now she knew he was busy searching, and she felt guilty because she had taken a rest. She could hear him walking through the rooms, pounding on the walls, looking for hollow places, whispering his daughter’s name. She could hear everything now.
“Give my baby back to me,” she whispered, but the house refused to answer.
Perry thought the mirror on the bathroom wall might hide a passageway, so together they spent hours trying to remove it. The house gripped it tightly as if it were part of its own skin. At last they collapsed into each other’s arms, crying softly, staring into the mirror from the floor. Hannah thought their images in the mirror were too faded and pale to be real. Two malevolent spirits haunting this wonderful old house, haunting the little girl who lived here.
The sounds rose and fell outside the bathroom door. Hannah could not distinguish individual strains in the tide. She listened for a very long time.
“I’m going to be crazy now,” she whispered to the house. And whispered it through the rooms for years.
But sometimes it grew quiet and there were other sounds, soft footsteps and a child’s laughter, the sound of someone happy in her house of dreams.
KITE
“Imagine,” said Stuart’s new friend again.
But Stuart didn’t have to imagine. He was sure the dragon was real now. It sliced through the air, leaving a shimmer of brown and gray in the bright blue sky. Its tail of torn black diamonds sailed high above his head, then dipped playfully until it almost touched his hair. It was a terrible, wonderful thing. The dragon flew as if he wasn’t even holding onto its string.
“Imagine, Stuart. Show me what you can do.” His friend wasn’t watching the dragonkite. He was watching Stuart. He’d been watching Stuart ever since they’d met a few weeks ago, in the woods nobody had told Stuart existed, right at the boundary of the compound, farther away from home than he or any of the other children was ever allowed to go.
“You have everything you need right here,” the grownups told them. Or, sometimes, “We need you to stay close to home.” Stuart didn’t underst
and. It often seemed to him that grownups were not the same species as children. He’d never, of course, seen a child grow up into an adult; now that they were all eleven, he still couldn’t imagine it.
The dragon unfolded its black wings to hug and trap the wind. Stuart didn’t think he’d made it do that. Its long tail swayed elegantly back and forth, stroking the wind, turning the wind cold and almost visible.
Stuart thought nervously of his mother. Her songs to him were about rainbows and flowers and fuzzy little creatures who would do anything for you—be your pet, mascot, protector, friend—as long as you thought well of them. His mother wouldn’t like the dragonkite.
She wouldn’t like this new friend of his, either. “What’s your name?” Stuart had asked after they’d walked a short distance into the woods. “My name’s Stuart. What do I call you?”
The small, thin man—not much bigger than the children but considerably older, although younger than any of the parents—had smiled, showing teeth of many colors; some of the front pointy ones were black, making Stuart look away. He’d said a word that Stuart had never heard before. Stuart had frowned, asked him to say it again.
“Eliahedron,” he’d said, or something like that.
Stuart found he couldn’t hold a picture of the name in his mind, and when he was away from Eliahedron he wasn’t even really sure what the man looked like or why he was his friend. It was the first time in his life he could remember that happening; everything else was much more real in his mind than anywhere else.
The dragon puffed and spun and turned itself inside out. It became some other thing then, but was still a dragon, too, and still a kite. Stuart held on tight to the string because that’s what you were supposed to do with kites, but he wasn’t entirely sure that the string cutting across his palms had anything to do with the giant creature soaring and gnashing its teeth.
“That’s good,” Eliahedron said, watching him. “You’re good at this, Stuart. The best I’ve seen.” Stuart smiled.