House Haunted

by Al Sarrantonio

  Oh, Mother—

  He did not wake, because it was not a dream. But suddenly he came up short, nearly walking into a black wrought-iron post curving out above the road to hold a brass basket of white and red roses. Riveted to the pole was a tarnished sign that said, KOLNO INN.

  Flanking the sign was a lane, and he turned into it.

  The path was lined with rosebushes, trellised up nearly to Jan's height. He could see where some had been clipped for the basket out front, strong green stems covered with thick red thorns, which ended suddenly in sharp, slanting lines. But there were more than enough, in various states of bloom. The largest, in full flower, was wider than his closed fist. But these vague observations, which battled with all of the other fears and anxieties that had been in his mind since this morning, were pushed aside at the sight of the hotel.

  It seemed to appear before him out of thin air. One step he was on the rose-enshrouded path, and the next step he was in the courtyard. His first thoughts were of a peasant cottage on a monstrous scale. There were three stories. The front was flat, lines of ornamentally shuttered windows set on a dark chocolate-brown façade of diagonally laid planks of wood. The roof was edged in scrollwork, and at the four corners, there were turrets, each with a small, square window.

  The front door of the inn was low and wide. Dark flat stones led up to it.

  Fearing only what lay behind him more than what lay ahead, Jan walked to the door and used the heavy brass knocker.

  The sound echoed once and then was swallowed from within. No one came to let him in. He pulled at the wrought-iron handle, curved against the door in the shape of a long, open-mouthed gargoyle. His fingers drew back; he thought fleetingly of the old woman's words about “demons.” But she had only been seeking money. He put his hand on the monstrous door handle and tried the door.

  It opened, and he entered.

  At the end of a short hallway, through an entranceway was a small lobby. It looked as though it might once have been a taproom. The ceiling was oppressively low. The front desk might once have served as the bar. Above it, abutting the ceiling, was a thick square beam that ran the length of the desk. On it were intricate carvings of animal grotesques. Jan shivered. There were bloated pigs with the faces of wild men, mouths grinning, sitting on their haunches, bellies sliced open to reveal hanging strings of sausages and bacon slabs immersed in twisting clouds of smoke. There were goats with the heads of women, sprouting great tufts of hair, open mouths full of sharp teeth. Some were biting themselves; one had its head thrust into the gaping stomach of an adjacent sow. Above these fantastic animals, at the line of the ceiling, had been carved scenes of violent weather: fat thunderclouds with thick jets of rain pelting down, hailstones square as bales of hay, blizzards of snow stacked up in leaning drifts against the unheedful animals below. Jan studied the bizarre scenes, moving along the desk slowly from depiction to depiction. The thick black beam drew him, mesmerized.

  “What do you want?”

  The rough sound of a human voice startled him. A short man was now facing him from behind the front desk. A door behind him, which had been closed, was now open wide. The man had a shock of white hair like those of the fantastic goat-women above him. But there was no goat body below his neck, only a hard torso sporting a green felt vest. In one sharp-fingered hand he held a piece of bread that had been torn from a loaf and a slice of sausage, which he now pressed together before bringing them to his mouth. Half of this meal disappeared into his mouth, and he chewed, waiting for Jan to speak, regarding him with his unfriendly eyes.

  “Are you Edward?”

  The other continued to chew, his hand holding the remaining sausage and bread, pressing them together. He started to bring his hand up to his mouth but stopped and said, “You have a reservation?”

  “No. Your hotel was recommended to me by a friend.”

  “Recommended, eh?” For a moment the man's stare lessened, but then he put the rest of his meal into his mouth and wiped his hands across the front of his vest. “It will cost you extra if you don't have a reservation.”

  “How much?”

  “Twenty for the room. And ten more for not phoning ahead.”

  “That's too much,” Jan bluffed, remembering the old blind woman's warning about the proprietor being a skinflint. “When my friend stayed he said it was ten for the room.”

  “Twenty.” Edward shook his head. “Costs go up.”

  “I could stay at the other hotel.”

  “Go on, then,” Edward said, but he added, “all right. Ten it is for the room. In advance. And ten more for not reserving.”

  Remembering the blind woman's other words, Jan said, “I want a room in the rear of the hotel.”

  Edward looked momentarily surprised; his surprise quickly turned to impatience. “Fine,” he said. “Just pay in advance.”

  Jan paid him and was taken to a small room in one of the back corners of the third floor. It was hot. It looked out onto an oppressively close stand of oak trees. What little light reached the room filtered through the sway of branches. Looking out through the small window, he saw the entire back of the hotel was suffocated by encroaching trees. Damn old woman. So much for her advice about morning sun.

  When Edward had left him, Jan lay on the bed. He found it lumpy, tilted annoyingly to one side. It smelled of old feathers and mildew. He laced his hands behind his head, finding with his fingers a rip in the pillow. He stared at the ceiling, trying to think of nothing, to make this day, what had happened to his life, vanish. But it would not. He saw it all again, as if played on a television screen: the haunted look on Jozef's face as he approached them on the bridge with his news; the smug visage of the man in the trench coat, sure of his job and his prey; and his mother's face, looming over him, telling him to get up for work, then weeping alone in her room after the police had gone, her rosary clutched in her praying hands, kneeling over the quilt, crying and praying to God crucified over her bed on his crucifix

  He pushed himself up on his elbows at a sound of movement, and there at the end of his bed was a girl he had never seen before, holding her hand out to him. She was short, her pale face suffused with freckles, her hair straight and red. She did not look Polish. But when she spoke, she spoke Polish to him.

  “Don't worry, Jan. My name is Bridget.”

  He reached his hand out to her, and she took it in her own. Her touch was gentle, but in the fingers he felt a fierce hardness. He sensed that, if she wanted, she could grip him so tight it would feel as though his hand were in a vise. And yet she held it now as gently as a lover.

  “Come with me,” she said, in her beautiful, soft, enigmatic voice, letting his hand go.

  He rose from the bed. She walked into the far corner of the room. He thought she had disappeared. But then he saw that the shadows in the corner lengthened and the walls did not meet. There was a door there.

  Jan entered the shadows, leaving all but faint tendrils of light behind. He felt the walls with his hands. Abruptly, there were stairs. He climbed. Above him, the stairway ended, and he faintly saw the girl.

  “Come, Jan,” she called tenderly to him.

  He reached the doorway. Inside was an attic, dimly lit by red light falling through a small, round, stained-glass window. At first he did not see the girl, but then he located her at the far end of the room. The girl was standing over a bed, a mattress laid on the floor, covered in silken sheets. She smiled at him. Wordlessly, not taking her eyes from him, she removed the shoulder straps of her gown. The gown fell to her feet, revealing her naked to him. She was a mixture of girl and woman. Her face, the perfect white lines of her body, were childlike, yet the rise of her breasts, the V of deep red hair below her belly, the loving smile and the magnetic sexuality of her look and stance aroused him deeply. She held her hand out. He went to her, and as he took her hand she lay back on the bed, pulling him down above her. She lay very still, looking into his eyes. Her hair was almost the color of cherries. She let h
is hand go so that he could touch her. There was a perfect mole on her right shoulder. He wanted to kiss her. She looked into his eyes. “Soon, Jan,” she whispered, a moan. “Soon you will have me.”

  She vanished beneath him.

  Someone struck Jan roughly, on the back. He was on the lumpy bed in a stuffy back room of the Kolno Inn. He was pulled away from the bed and turned around, then pushed back, feeling the lumps of the old mattress under him.

  The man who had pushed him now held him with his hand on Jan's chest and sat down next to him on the bed. It was the man in the trench coat. Behind him, to either side of the window, stood the two uniformed policemen. They looked tired; one of them yawned into his hand.

  The man in the trench coat took his hand off Jan's chest and flipped open a small notebook.

  “You are Jan Pesak?” he asked, matter-of-factly. Jan said nothing.

  The man in the trench coat looked down at him; when he spoke he sounded almost bored. “I can make one phone call from downstairs,” he said quietly, “and it would be very hard for your mother indeed.”

  He looked at Jan dispassionately.

  “I am Jan Pasek,” Jan said.

  The man in the trench coat wrote something in the notebook and then closed it, putting it into his pocket. He studied Jan's face for a moment. He, too, looked as though he wanted to yawn.

  “You caused me great inconvenience,” he said, and then he swung his fist in a high arc over the bed and hit Jan squarely on the nose.

  Jan felt an explosion of pain followed by numbness. Another blow struck his face. Dully, he looked up to see that the two uniformed cops had moved to the bed. The man in the trench coat stepped back. The uniformed men began to beat him methodically, raining blows on his ribs and stomach. He tried to roll into a fetal position. They struck his head and legs. One of them pulled him to the floor between them, and they began to kick him.

  Through the curtain of torment that was lowering him to unconsciousness, Jan heard the man in the trench coat tell them to stop. He heard the word “dinner.” Turning his head, he saw through one nearly closed eye the man in the trench coat leave with one of the uniformed men. The other sat on the bed, trying to light a cigarette with an uncooperative lighter.

  Jan attempted to sit up. The uniformed cop put his lighter aside on the bed. “Feel like fighting?” He laughed, dipping his boot toe into a sore spot in Jan's side, rolling him over onto his back.

  Jan felt another deep push of pain in his side and then blacked out.

  When he awoke they were carrying him through the lobby of the hotel. Edward, the proprietor, had another sandwich of sausage and bread in his hand. He turned his face away from Jan as he was dragged through the front doorway, his shoes scraping over the flagstones outside. Jan caught a glimpse of the roses through nearly closed lids. He could smell the flowers; their sweetness was mingled with the odor of his own blood.

  He was carried a long way. They had not been able to get their big car down the road to the hotel and so had had to walk. They dumped him once on the way, to rest. Jan heard one of the cops grunting, the other making fun of him for being out of shape.

  “You would be, too, if you relied on using your head instead of your fists,” his partner replied. The other mocked him in return until the man in the trench coat told them to stop bickering.

  They dragged him to the town square, near the statue, where a dark sedan was parked at an angle. The blind woman was still in her accustomed spot. She cocked her head up and smiled at Jan as he was taken past her.

  “You found your way to the hotel?” she said, giggling throatily, but Jan didn't know whether she spoke to him or the policemen.

  He was thrown into the backseat of the car. One of the uniformed cops got in heavily beside him. The other got behind the wheel, the man in the trench coat beside him in the front seat.

  The car wouldn't start. The driver cursed, the uniformed man next to Jan, mocking his friend's ability as a chauffeur. Sharply, the man in the trench coat told them to shut up. The engine turned over, the driver shouting in triumph as they pulled away.

  Jan lay on the backseat, watching the slate gray of the sky go past through the rear window. The face of the uniformed cop hovered over him. “Enjoy it now.” The cop smiled. He nodded at the sky with his head. “You won't be seeing that where you're going.”

  After a while Jan slept, the needs of his beaten body aided by the soothing motion of the automobile. At first, his sleep was dreamless. But later, as they approached their destination, the underground place in whose elevator only the bureaucrats and the dead ever rose, he dreamed not of his mother but of Bridget, the red-haired girl, holding her naked body out to him and telling him, gently in his ear, “Soon.”

  8. WEST

  It was hardest to stay away from the cocaine when his legs hurt.

  Some days it was his neck that hurt, or his lower back. Some days, when the clouds were low and gray and wet over the Pacific, he hurt all over, a dull aching as if he were a giant throbbing tooth.

  He had switched to coke when the doctors took the morphine away from him in the hospital; some of them had even remarked what a wonderfully easy withdrawal he had had from the morphine, which, they insisted, he had become dependent on.

  Withdrawal, my ass, he had thought at the time. All I did was change accounts. One of the doctors, the shrewd young one who had come out of the Peace Corps and was stupid enough to be in medicine for reasons other than ego or money, guessed what had happened, but Ray had become very clever himself and began to hide the cocaine, taking it only when the doctor, Madelaine, wasn't around. She had taken to showing up unexpectedly, and once had walked into the living room while a long line of coke lay waiting on the coffee table for the straw Ray was looking for. But he had been able to distract her away from it, eventually having to dust it off the table onto the rug while she turned to look at a Mondrian print he pointed out to her on the far wall. Later in the day he had spent two hours cursing and crying, pulling his useless legs out of the wheelchair till he collapsed on the floor, sucking at the dirty fibers with the straw he had finally located, getting as much grit and nylon up his nose as diluted coke. The two hours had hardly been worth it, and finally he had fallen asleep, exhausted and worn with frustrated rage. Madelaine had found him the next morning when she came in with the housekeeper, and the only satisfaction he had gotten out of the entire affair was her inability to find any more coke in her search of the house.

  But that had been early in the rehabilitation, when the doctors still hovered around him, when he knew he needed something to drown out the awful memories in his head, the awful sound of Bridget's laughter.

  After a while he had come to an accommodation with the drug. They lived in peaceful coexistence, and he was proud of the fact that he had fought it to the point where he had convinced himself that it was a medicine only, to be taken only when the pain got bad . . .

  The pain was bad today. He rolled himself from the window, leaving the clouds making moving shadows over the rolling lawn (his dream to run down that lawn to the beach beyond, to the ocean, his legs moving him, throwing him into the blue Pacific . . .), and went to his desk and pulled out the file drawer. He pushed the green hanging folders back and lifted the thin plywood panel on the false bottom beneath. The white powder was already measured (doctors measure, medicine is measured), and he dusted it out expertly in a line on the top of the desk, lowered the straw he had removed from the hollow in the drawer, sucked the (medicine) up into his head .

  The telephone—all the telephones in the house—rang.

  He screamed suddenly, throwing his head back, the powder driven up deep into his sinuses like a pounding headache. The ring sounded again. He sat frozen in his wheelchair, staring at the black instrument that lay not two feet away from him on the corner of the desk over the file drawer. That was not the ring of the man selling Time magazine, or the call of an aluminum-siding salesman.

  He knew if he took the
phone apart, unscrewed the bottom panel and found the ringing mechanism, that it would not be ringing at this moment.

  The telephone rang again.

  Bridget.

  His hand reached out for it; somewhere in the back of his mind and body his arm ached feebly. The cocaine was making the ache lessen, but the arthritic throb suddenly strengthened. He cried out. It felt as if his arm had burst into flame, the fingers burning stick twigs that would incandesce into white fire and ash, filter off his hand

  “Oh, Jesus!” he called out, as the fire shot up his arm, through his chest to his legs. It felt as if someone were hammering on his legs with pure strikes of heat. Flames wrapped up through his neck into his head; he felt his hair on fire.

  Suddenly, the heat went away.

  The phone, all the phones, stopped ringing.

  He sat gasping in the wheelchair, overcome with chills. He hunched painfully over, holding himself. The heat was being drawn out of his body as if it were being sucked through a straw, leaving a vacuum of cold.

  “Jesus.” He shivered.

  He looked at the phone.

  His hand trembling like an old man's, cold hunching him over arthritically, he reached out to pick up the receiver.

  As his finger touched it, a shot of pure heat went through his hand to his shoulder.

  “Shit!”

  He drew back in pain; then, slowly, he reached out to the phone again.

  He laid his hand on it gently, hovering until sure there was no more heat.

  His fingers like claws, he picked the phone up and brought it to his ear.

  Hissing. He heard the hissing of long distance, distant voices swimming. They didn't sound like they were having human conversations. A thin, faraway crackle of laughter was pierced by an equally distant, high, humming scream.

  The hissing intensified. He could feel her waiting out there for him.