House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  Gary smiled and moved on to a set of Napoleonic painted figurines; Napoleon faced by Wellington as opposing kings. There was another comprised entirely of Harlequins. Harold brought the young man to one case, opening it to remove a rook and put it in his hand.

  “Cast iron,” he said, taking it and placing it back with its fellows. “Identical to a set given to Morphy at a testimonial dinner. Only, his were cast in gold and silver.”

  They finished their tour, and Harold led his guest from the room, closing the door behind him and switching off the lights. On the way back to the living room he stopped to show Gary his collection of chess books, set in a single tall mahogany bookcase. Lining the edge of the bookcase shelves were pawns of various styles. “Philiodor, the great French player, said that pawns are the soul of chess,” Harold explained.

  He looked at his guest with concern, realizing that once more he had been doing most of the talking. Gary had become remote; though he had shown interest, his eyes had begun to wander.

  “Did you like it?” Harold asked.

  Gary's eyes and lax smile came back to him. “Yes. Very much.”

  There followed an awkward silence. They stood by the front hallway, next to the wing chair with the young man's jacket draped over it, which Gary made no move to retrieve. Harold felt suddenly unsure of himself. It had been so long since he had brought anyone to his home. Should there be something he should say or do now?

  “Would you by any chance have a glass of soda?” Gary asked, suddenly.

  “Yes, of course!” Harold replied. “Please.” He motioned back into the living room. “We can talk.”

  “May I come with you to the kitchen?” Gary asked.

  “Yes, if you'd like. We can sit there, at the kitchen table.”

  They went into the kitchen. Again Harold was glad that the woman had been in to clean the day before; normally there would be more than the few dishes in the sink, complemented by a scattering of the previous week's newspapers on the butcher-block table.

  He hurried to the refrigerator and withdrew two cans of 7-Up. He held them out for approval, and when Gary nodded pleasantly, he placed them on the counter, reaching up above to one of the cabinets to get two glasses. He brought everything over to the table and motioned for Gary to sit.

  “Do you by any chance have a can opener?” the young man asked.

  Harold pointed to the self-opening tab on the can. “You don't need one.”

  “I have to be careful of cuts.”

  You're a hemophiliac? he nearly blurted out, managing to change it to an, “Oh.” He added, “I'll open it for you.”

  “I prefer to do things myself,” Gary answered, sounding almost hurt.

  “Of course,” Harold quickly replied. He slid open a drawer next to the dishwasher and, after some rummaging, located a can opener.

  “Thank you,” Gary said, taking the can opener, his other hand closing hard around Harold's outstretched arm.

  “Oh—” Harold gasped, at both the pain of Gary's grip on his arm and the widening realization that he did not know this young man after all.

  Gary smiled, showing his teeth, and pushed Harold backward, still gripping his arm tightly. Harold came to rest hard against the kitchen counter. Incongruously, he felt the beginnings of a sour stomach and thought of his antacid tablets. He felt the outline of the counter against his back and the rectangular gap that traced the now-closed drawer from which he had taken the can opener to hand to this young man, who now, for the first time since Harold had known him, showed his teeth in his smile—small, yellowed incisors that made his face look paler, his hair more blond, his eyes as bright as if he had removed his glasses.

  “Gary—” he begged, but the young man did not listen to him. He pushed Harold back, bending him over the counter and holding him under the chin while he tore down from the throat in ragged scraping lines with the can opener.

  The old man shrieked out Gary's name and then gurgled, and then he didn't make any more noise.

  After a long time, when the taut muscles of Gary's working arm began to ache, he finally stepped back and let the thing that had been Harold drop to the floor.

  Gary cleaned the can opener with his handkerchief, then dropped it next to the body and walked deliberately to the kitchen table. He picked up one of the 7-Ups and opened it, using the pop-top. He poured it carefully into one of the glasses and drank it.

  When he finished, he cleaned the glass and can and set them down on the table and went to the front hall. He picked his gym bag up, placed it on the chair, and opened it. Inside was a clean white turtleneck, a clean pair of chinos, socks, and sneakers. He changed into the clean clothes, rolling up the blood-soaked ones he had been wearing and stuffing them into the bag. His jacket was draped over the arm of the chair, and he smoothed the cracked leather with his hands. He put it on, over his white turtleneck. He picked up Harold's folding briar chess set, which was on the seat of the wing chair, opened it, cleaned each piece with his handkerchief. He tossed the set back down on the chair.

  He crossed the living room and walked down the short hallway, switching on the fluorescent lights in the room on the left. He went in, walked to the tall glass case enclosing the chess set made of human bone. Using the handkerchief, he opened the case, knocked over the king on the board, and reclosed the case.

  He returned to the living room, picked up his gym bag, and left the apartment, closing the door behind him.

  A half hour later, in his front room, Gary waited for the phone to ring. He hadn't removed his jacket. He brought the phone to the window, studying the deceptive beauty of Gramercy Park, the meticulously tended trees, the fat healthy squirrels.

  When the phone finally rang and he picked up the receiver, there was the customary silence filled only by space and the faint tickle of static.

  “Is there anything you want me to do?” Gary asked. The voice that was strong but sounded as if it came from far away said, “Not at the moment.” There was static, then:

  “Are you enjoying yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. In a short time there will be much to do.”

  “I'll be ready.”

  “I know you will, Gary.” A kittenish, purring quality came into the voice. “Do you feel strong?”

  Gary's hand holding the receiver clutched it tightly; he felt as though he could crush it if he wanted—could crush anything if he wanted.

  “Yes, I feel strong.”

  “I know.” Before the voice faded into the neutral vast silence of the phone wires, it asked, “Doesn't it feel good to be invincible?”

  3. EAST

  A woman with chin hair came to get him each afternoon. He guessed the time to be about one o'clock. She was not a fat woman, as you would expect a woman with hair on her chin to be, but slim, almost shapely, with doe-dark eyes and soft, thin black hair brushed away from her eyes the way a man with such hair might do. Her nose was slim and straight, her mouth large, the lips moist, nearly always lipsticked. She had ample breasts, evident beneath her uniform smock, which was a shade softer in material and color than those the other attendants wore. In many ways, she was a desirable woman. But the presence of hair on her chin—long, black curls of it that grew down under the ledge of her chin to rest their points against her upper neck—negated all of her feminine qualities. Jan could not understand this one monstrous anomaly that made all of her femininity, her lipstick, her dark eyes shaded with eye shadow, ironic. She reminded him of the nuns who had taught him at school. Some of them had seemed almost feminine; behind their habits you could detect the outlines and allure of a woman. But invariably there would be one trait that would set them apart from normal women, one flaw, physical or psychological, that branded them as different.

  “Come, Jan,” she said. He had tried once to look into her eyes, but there had been such depths there, such unminable territory, a life so completely alien to him that he had looked away in embarrassment.

  “Come,”
she repeated, in her soft voice.

  She led him down the hallway, through a series of corridors. They turned right, left, left, right. He tried to keep track of the turnings, the lengths of corridors. The walls smelled of damp. There were deep rivuleted cracks, evidence of cement long neglected. Jan would know from the damp alone that he was underground; it was always chilly, and even when the lights were turned out, he could not tell if it was night or day.

  He knew that they were buried deep. One day during the first week he had seen an elevator open, in one of the corridors he had not been taken to since, and out of the corner of his eye, he had seen the huge lift entrance, as wide as a barn door. When the doors had suddenly opened, offering him a view of the vastness of the compartment, he had felt, down in his gut, the huge weight of that elevator and the slowness and extreme length of its descent. Now, whenever he thought of that elevator, he thought of the surface, of night, day, sunlight, leaves dripping wet on trees, rain itself, the world without pain.

  “Stop, Jan,” the woman with chin hair said. Her voice was as soft as if she had asked him the time in a tavern, trying to get a date with him. They stood before two doors. Each had a mirrored round window in it. His attendant, who had not told him her name when he had asked, before he had learned to be fascinated with her depths, and to fear them, gave him her mysterious smile. It was the smile of the Mona Lisa. Which do you want? it said. Which door should we choose? And will you choose the right door? Have they changed them this day? Did we walk down this corridor to these two doors the last time?

  “Choose,” she said suddenly, laughing, startling Jan, sending a chill through him.

  Before he could choose, she said, “Right door.”

  She reached for the handle, but it was opened from within.

  Someone had been looking at them through the porthole, the one-way glass.

  The room was bright, white tiles and silver chrome. He had been going to say, “Left.” That would have brought him isolation, an empty dark room, mere loneliness. This meant the other thing.

  She did not touch him; he stumbled into the room as if in a dream.

  “Pain,” she said softly, smiling sadly, her doe eyes dark. He fainted, and remembered no more.

  Later, in his room, he heard other screams. He did not remember his own screams. He did not even remember if he had screamed. Perhaps he had laughed, or tried to fight the attendant with the chin hair, or even the other attendant, the man with muscled arms and a head covered with small tight blond curls. He did not even remember the needle going into him. Perhaps they had made the muscles stand out on his arms, or his mouth twitch as if it had been jolted with electricity, or his privates engorge with blood or to the point where he blacked out. Maybe they had asked him questions the answers to which he did not know or, finally, one that he did know the answer to. Perhaps they had finally found that place in him they wanted and had drained it dry, leaving no memory in him of their excision, and now they would let him go, or kill him.

  But there were other screams now. There were no faces to go with the screams, because he had never seen any of the other prisoners. There was a shrill, begging, high scream, the scream of a very young man. There was another young man, whose scream was level and low, like a barking angry dog fighting its pain. And there was a third, the scream of an old woman, a husky, deep, begging voice.

  The very young man was screaming now, high wails punctuated by gasps, through which Jan could faintly hear an electric sound, the sound of sparking voltage.

  In a little while, the young man would stop screaming, and then, after a short hiatus, one of the others would begin. He turned to the wall by his bed. By his reckoning, and by the schedule of screams he heard, the lights would soon go out, signaling the beginning of his underground night.

  Jan closed his eyes and tried to make night come sooner.

  He thought of Bridget. He had never had her, though he knew that someday he would. She had told him that, the day she had shown herself naked to him. There were times when he thought she was imagined, a vivid creation of his mind. But she had come to him enough times now, times when he was not drugged or so deep in despair that hallucinations--of his mother, his friends—would rise unbidden, that he was convinced of her reality. He had really been convinced the first time, even before he had been brought here. And she had told him then that he would someday have her.

  He had never had a woman. He had often bragged that he had, before he had ended up in this place, when he and his friends, all of them below the age of twenty, had told the same lies about being with women. One of their group, Karol, had a girlfriend, but they all knew she had never let him have anything, only because they all knew her and knew the strict religiousness of her family, and mostly because Karol claimed she had let him have everything. The more a boy claimed to have received from a girl, the less he had. It was a rule they all knew, but wouldn't admit to. They all called Karol's girlfriend The Nun behind Karol's back.

  There had been one girl whom Jan had known well, and it had almost happened, but the girl's father had come into the barn for some hay and she had quickly buttoned her blouse. They had been drinking beer at a fair all afternoon, and things had progressed to this logical point, but after her father left, she seemed to have sobered and refused to have Jan near her. A week later she was with another boy, not one of Jan's friends, and apparently she had kept her blouse unbuttoned for him, because three months later there was a wedding, when she began to show.

  But Bridget would be his; she had promised him. And she had returned so many times to renew her promise that he believed her. For his sanity, he had to.

  He opened his eyes and stared at the concrete wall. If he touched it, his finger would come away with a bead of wetness on it. The lights had not gone out yet. The screaming of the young boy had stopped.

  He rolled over on the cot and sat up, his feet lying heavily on the floor. He felt numb, a dead man made of damp concrete.

  He wanted Bridget now. He wanted not only to imagine but to see her, to touch her. He put his hand gently to his groin and found himself hard. He tried to conjure her up, as she had appeared to him that first time, on the day they took him. He tried to see her now.

  She was as young as Jan. Her eyes were the color of blue spring sky over the river. He had seen such a blue sky one day when he was fishing with his father, when he was twelve, and the Vistula River was so cold and clear that it reflected the purity of the sky and seemed to make it twice as blue and clean. They were large eyes, in a round face, not the face of a peasant but not one of royalty, either. She had fair skin, with freckles lightly set around her nose. The freckles were so faint he could only see them when he was close enough to kiss her. He wanted to kiss her now. Her mouth was full and large, her teeth almost perfect, small, white and even.

  Her hair was red, not the dull red of some Warsaw girls, not the flaming wild color of some of the Irish girls he had seen on magazine covers, but a rich, dark red, the color of harvest plums. It was cut neither short nor long, cropped straight around her neckline. It looked as though it might once have been very long, over her shoulders. It was hair that should be allowed to proliferate, to grow the way wet rich plants grow. In his mind, he had put his hand through it, and though it was straight and thick there was a softness to it, a fineness, that was one of the most sensual things he had ever felt. He thought of it as the full feeling of water at the exact, cool temperature to tingle and refresh the skin of the hand on a hot, dry day.

  Her hair and her eyes together made her extraordinary. She was short, with pale hands, and, like her nose, the backs of her hands were sprinkled with freckles. The skin was clean as milk, nearly as white. Her body was thin, with the delicate bulges of small breasts that stood straight out from her body, capped by large dark areolas and wide red nipples. He thought of the delicate line of her thigh where it merged into leg . . .

  Her smile showed hidden depths, like that of the female attendant with chin hair.
But where the attendant's gaze was direct, Bridget's came from under her eyes, as she bowed her head forward, shading her ocean-blue eyes, almost, and smiling from under the exquisite face, the freckles on her nose, the lips of her wide mouth parting slightly, showing the whiteness of her tiny, perfect teeth. He had imagined the way her tongue would feel against his mouth, his face, within his own mouth. He had imagined kissing her, knowing that her tongue would be sharp and thin, that it would greatly excite him.

  His hand had moved down behind the long, badly cut, rough-stitched prisoner's overalls he wore; he took himself in his hand. He wanted Bridget, now.

  And suddenly she stood before his cot, her face bent slightly down to him, the ring of her plum-red hair framing her face like a Rembrandt portrait, the luminous vision of her filling him.

  “Jan, my poor one.” She smiled.