Night Things: A Novel of Supernatural Terror

by Talbot, Michael

  Lauren smiled at the bygone wording of the caption, but when she turned the card back around and looked at the gay and reckless Miss Norman she saw something she hadn’t noticed before. Behind the sleigh was a house, and although its features were partially obscured by a fairyland mantle of snow, Lauren realized with a start it was Lake House. “Why, this is Lake House!” she exclaimed.

  “What?”

  “In this picture of Mae Norman. This is Lake House behind her, isn’t it?”

  “Sure is,” said the girl.

  Pleased that she had found something positive about the house, she brought the postcard over to the counter. “Mae Norman certainly was beautiful,” she said, continuing to admire the picture.

  “Yes, she was,” the girl said, and then added idly, “That picture was taken just before the tragedy.”

  Lauren looked up abruptly. “What tragedy?”

  Again the girl blinked at her with surprise. “A man was murdered in the house during a party Mae Norman gave. Apparently the scandal it caused is what ended her career.” Lauren’s eyes widened as a look of horror spread across her face. “There there have been two murders in the house?” She tried to keep her voice down so Garrett wouldn’t hear.

  “You mean you didn’t know any of this?” the girl asked cautiously.

  “No!” Lauren snapped, and the girl jumped. Feeling foolish for losing her temper, she asked calmly, “How was the man killed?”

  The girl hesitated, afraid to go on. “Stabbed,” she murmured falteringly.

  “Did they catch the murderer this time?”

  “They tried a man, but he was acquitted. No one ever really knew who did it. I guess that’s why it ruined Mae Norman’s career. There was no evidence she had committed the murder. But there was no evidence anyone else had done it either.”

  Lauren thought about everything she had been told for a moment and then looked at the girl pleadingly. “Have there been any other murders in the house you haven’t told me about?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the girl said weakly, as she rang up Lauren’s things.

  “Thanks. Come on, Garrett,” she said loudly. “Time to go.”

  When they arrived back at the house, Lauren told Garrett to go upstairs to his bedroom and then went looking for Stephen. She found him in the drawing room. “Look,” he said jubilantly as he flicked a switch on the wall and all the lights in the room went on.

  She was pleased by the display, but still too upset by what the shopgirl had told her about the house to show it.

  “Stephen, did you know that two people were murdered in this house?”

  Stephen’s smile evaporated. “Who told you that?”

  “A salesgirl at the Clearwater Lodge.”

  He stretched out his arm and bared the palm of his hand apologetically. “Listen, honey, it really doesn’t matter.” She looked at him incredulously. “You mean you already know about it? You knew about it and you took the house anyway?”

  “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to upset you. I knew it would probably bother you if you knew someone had been killed in the house. It all happened so long ago anyway I didn’t see what real difference it made. I thought by not telling you I was just saving you from having to worry about it.”

  “Not just one,” she corrected. “Two people. Two people were murdered in this house, and in neither instance was the murderer ever really found.”

  “So two people were murdered in the house!” he said, getting testy. “And so the murderers were never found. For God’s sake, the two crimes took place over thirty years apart and the last one was committed more than sixty years ago! You sound like you think they might be connected.” Although she was angry, she knew he was right. She had been told about the two murders in such rapid succession she somehow assumed they might be connected, that in some strange way they presaged danger for them as well. But now she realized how ridiculous that was.

  “Listen, if I’d known it was going to upset you so, I never would have kept the information from you. I thought I was doing the right thing.”

  His penitent air started to disperse her anger. “Well, for future reference, remember that I used to be an investigative reporter. I can’t stand it when people keep important parts of a story from me.”

  “I’ll remember.”

  She forced a smile. “Okay.” She thought of something else. “By the way, when you told us about the house you said Sarah Balfram went crazy because she was jilted. You said that’s why she built Lake House the way she did. But she wasn’t jilted. Her fiancé was murdered. And not only that, but the shopgirl told me Sarah Balfram finished building Lake House before she even met her fiancé.”

  “So?”

  “So, is there anything else you’re not telling me?”

  He raised both of his hands. “Honest, honey, all I know is she was crazy. I was hardly listening when the real estate agent was telling me all these stupid old stories. I thought he was just making them up because he thought I’d think they were cool or something. I’m sorry.”

  “You don’t know why she was crazy? The girl at Clearwater Lodge said something strange. She said Sarah Balfram was ‘clever crazy.’ The shopgirl said she used to give lectures or something. Do you know anything about that?”

  “No,” he said firmly.

  “Okay.” She sighed, then paused in thought for a moment. “Oh, just out of curiosity, who did you hire to run the generator?”

  “An old guy. Mr. Foley. He’s lived in the area for forty years. He seemed the most dependable.”

  “Well, now that you’ve taken care of hiring someone to run the generator, what do you say we all go on that picnic? I bought a book of hiking trails through the Adirondacks.” She withdrew the book from her bag.

  Again Stephen became long-faced. “Gee, honey, this hiring stuff took longer than I thought. I’ve got a dozen phone calls I’ve gotta make. I know we came up here to get away from everything, but some guy’s just released a single that’s climbing the charts and Rolling Stone has called him the next Stephen Ransom. Apparently he looks and sounds just like me, even does the same sort of stuff I do. I’ve gotta have a major powwow with Marty to figure out what we’re going to do.”

  She pursed her lips in a pout. “Okay.”

  He smiled and kissed her.

  She watched him as he vanished toward the kitchen, and then she turned and walked in the other direction. When she reached the entrance hall, Garrett was bounding in the front door excitedly. “I’ve got it,” he cried.

  “Got what?” she asked as he ran up to her.

  “I know why Sarah Balfram made her house the way she did.”

  She looked at him with apprehension. Although she was still convinced there was nothing to figure out, she did not like the look in his eye. “Why?”

  “Do you remember the sentence that’s written over the door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Look at it again.” He handed her a piece of paper on which he had copied down the words:

  In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

  She looked at it for a moment and then looked back at him. “Garrett, I don’t read Latin.”

  “No, just look at the sentence again.”

  She looked at it again, but it remained inscrutable to her. “Garrett, I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything.”

  “The letters in the words,” he exclaimed. “They’re the same forward as they are backward. When a sentence is written like that it’s called a palindrome. It’s a kind of puzzle.” She looked back at the paper and saw that he was right. “How neat!” she exclaimed. “What did you just call it?”

  “A palindrome.”

  “Now, where on earth did you learn that?”

  “In the puzzle section of one of my science magazines. There are lots of famous palindromes. ‘A man, a plan, a canal, Panama.’ That’s a real well-known one. ‘Tini saw drawer, a reward was in it,’ is another.”

  She paused, nodding
her head as she mentally spelled out each sentence in her mind. “You’re right!” she exclaimed, but her exuberance was short-lived. “But those are in English. Have you figured out what this one means yet?”

  “I don’t know what the words mean, but I know why it’s over the door.” His eyes glowed with enthusiasm, but still she remained confused.

  “Don’t you see?” he continued. “She put a palindrome over the door for a reason, as a sort of message. She’s trying to tell us something. She’s trying to tell us the house itself is some sort of giant puzzle.”

  A flutter of excitement passed through Lauren. Could he possibly be right? But after pondering the idea for a moment, she started to think of reasons to dismiss it. “I don’t know, Garrett. I just asked Stephen whether there was anything else he hadn’t told us about the house and he said no. If the house were some kind of giant puzzle I’m sure the real estate agent who rented him the place would have mentioned something about it.”

  “How do you know he would have mentioned it?”

  “Because it would be pretty neat if the house was actually a puzzle or something, and he would have mentioned it to help rent the place.”

  “But maybe he didn’t know,” Garrett protested. “Maybe that’s something Sarah Balfram, or whatever her name was, kept secret.”

  “Maybe,” Lauren said, smiling. “But maybe not. Maybe instead you should start writing some of these wild ideas of yours down. With your imagination you could make a million.”

  Despite his mother’s lack of interest, the idea that the house might be some kind of giant puzzle continued to fire Garrett’s imagination, and later that afternoon he went walking through the first-floor rooms to see if he could find anything else that might support his theory. However, when he reached the Moorish-style billiard room he ran headlong into Stephen busily playing a solitaire game of pool.

  “Hi, sport,” Stephen said as he ran the pool cue through his crooked fingers and the balls broke explosively.

  “Hi,” Garrett mumbled. He wanted to turn and run, but he realized it would be too obviously rude.

  Stephen sized up a ball and made another shot. Then he turned toward Garrett. “Hey, you wanna play pool with me?”

  Garrett stiffened. Because he was so excited over his new theory, he most certainly did not want to play. “I don’t know how to play,” he said, trying to get out of the situation gracefully.

  “Then I’ll teach you,” Stephen chirped.

  “Well, I did play pool once. But I didn’t like it.”

  “Maybe the reason you didn’t like it is that you weren’t that good at it yet. I can still teach you.”

  “No, I—” Garrett stammered. But then he noticed Stephen’s eyes narrowing and realized it was pushing his luck to keep turning down his offers.

  “Well, okay.”

  “Great! Then come over here and I’ll show you how to set up a shot.”

  Garrett reluctantly approached the table, and Stephen handed him a cue. Then he stood behind Garrett and helped guide the cue into the proper position.

  “Now, see that white ball? Try hitting it with the cue and getting it to knock that red ball into the pocket in the corner.”

  Garrett moved the cue back and forth between the crook in his fingers in a fashion so wobbly and palsied that he heard Stephen exhale loudly behind him.

  “No, hold it more level, like this.”

  Stephen guided the cue into the correct position and then stepped back. Garrett rammed the cue forward and hit the white ball, but off center and with such force it went hopping wildly over the edge of the table and bounced onto the floor.

  Stephen went and retrieved the ball from the floor. “Too hard. You don’t have to ram the cue into the white ball. Try doing it more gently.”

  As Stephen walked back to the table Garrett looked at him beseechingly, hoping he would perceive how little he was enjoying himself, but Stephen seemed not to notice. He set the balls in exactly the same position and stepped back. “Try it again.”

  Garrett returned his attention to the table and bit his lip with concentration. Under normal circumstances he hated such games. He saw no point in them. They didn’t develop the intellect as chess did, and you didn’t get anything out of them when they were over. There was no payoff, except to be able to say that someone won and someone lost. But to his astonishment, Stephen actually seemed to be trying for once, and he felt he had no choice but to reciprocate.

  He slid the cue back and forth between his fingers, nervously trying to calculate just the right momentum. But once again, to his enormous chagrin, he hit the ball too hard and it bounced across the green baize of the table and onto the floor.

  This time Stephen was less good-natured about it. “No, no, you used too much force. Pool is a game of precision and delicacy. You’re not trying to annihilate the ball. You’ve got to be more gentle.”

  “I was more gentle this time.”

  “Well, you weren’t gentle enough.”

  “Maybe I’m just not cut out to play pool.”

  Stephen remained determined. “No, try it again.”

  He set the balls up a third time and again Garrett slid the cue through his fingers, but this time he was so circumspect about what he was doing and tapped the ball so gently that it rolled only a few inches before stopping.

  Stephen looked at him with hawk eyes. “Are you doing this just to annoy me?”

  The accusation caused Garrett to flush. “No, I’m really trying.”

  Stephen continued to stare at him skeptically. “Then why aren’t you doing it right? It isn’t that difficult.”

  This angered Garrett, for although he was trying to do what Stephen was telling him, he realized the reason he was failing was probably that his heart wasn’t in it. “I told you I didn’t want to play. I don’t like pool.”

  Stephen seemed to have had about as much as he could take. “Do you know what would have happened if I had said something like that to my father?”

  “Something like you didn’t like pool?” Garrett asked with confusion.

  “No, not if I didn’t like pool. I mean what would have happened if my father was trying to teach me something and I told him I didn’t want to learn it.”

  “No, what?” Garrett asked, fidgeting. Something strange had come into Stephen’s demeanor, and it made Garrett nervous.

  Stephen sat down slowly on the edge of the billiard table, the strange quality in his demeanor intensifying as he kept his gaze intently on Garrett. “Let me tell you a story. I’m not from New York originally. I bet you didn’t know that. I grew up in a place called Charlevoix, Michigan. Do you have any idea where that is?”

  Garrett shook his head in short, spasmodic movements. Stephen held up his hand. “Well, Michigan’s shaped like a mitten, and Charlevoix is way up here at the top. It’s a lot different in Charlevoix than it is in New York. It’s a place that’s mainly just forest, kind of like here. The winters are cold, and the people have never heard of things like gelato or F.A.O. Schwarz.

  “Well, in Charlevoix, when fall came, one thing that just about everyone would do was go out hunting. Every guy, at least.”

  He chalked the end of his billiard cue with a kind of lethal grace as he spoke.

  “When I was little I used to long for the day when I was old enough to go off hunting with my dad. All during hunting season I’d get up at the crack of dawn when my dad got up. And I’d sit at the window for as many hours as it took for him to come home. When I got older he let me help clean his gun and practice shooting it. But he told me that I had to be at least twelve before he’d actually let me go with him.

  “Well, finally the day came when I was old enough, and I dressed up in a red-and-black felt cap just like my dad wore, and a red jacket with a vest full of little pockets for the shotgun shells, and we went hunting together. It was great. There’s just no other smell like the smell of a Michigan woods with a nip of frost in it. We had this old hunting dog named Spark,
and she ran to and fro trying to flush out a rabbit or something. And finally my dad spotted a squirrel up in a tree. Only as soon as the squirrel saw us coming it ran to the other side of the tree where we couldn’t see it. ‘This is it, son,’ my dad said. ‘This one’s yours.’ Then he went to the other side of the tree and made a racket with Spark to scare the squirrel back over to my side.

  Stephen exhaled wistfully. “Well, I took aim and fired and the squirrel fell out of the tree with a thud. And you know what happened?”

  “No,” Garrett said quietly. “What?”

  “When I saw that squirrel with its eye popped out with a piece of rifle shot and blood oozing from a dozen other little holes in its body, I just went to pieces. I couldn’t believe that I had actually killed the thing. I cried my eyes out. And you know what my dad did?” From the sparkle in Stephen’s eye it was clear that whatever his dad had done, Stephen felt it was at least worthy of a “True-Life Accounts of Amazing People” piece in Reader’s Digest. “What?” Garrett asked, breathless with anticipation. “He made me go on until I had shot another. And then another. In fact, from that day on until hunting season was over, he made me go hunting every day. And he made me skin the game I caught and clean it. Before winter came I had bagged more small game than just about anyone else in the county. It didn’t matter how unpleasant I thought it was. My dad just kept pushing me.”

  “But that’s awful!”

  “No, it wasn’t, because, you see, my dad didn’t allow me to fail. He made me become one of the best hunters in the county, and I’ll always love him for that.”