Jack of Spades

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  It was a cruel joke perhaps but—as Jack of Spades had pointed out—no one had forced C. W. Haider to initiate a lawsuit against King, Rush, and others.

  It’s her against you. She has laid a curse on you.

  Esdra told me that I could look through Ms. Haider’s bookshelves if I wanted to but he couldn’t help much. He had work to do outside—he was clearing away tree debris from a recent storm. No matter how hard he worked, seemed like he couldn’t keep up with all the things going wrong with the house, that would make Ms. Haider sad to see when she returned . . .

  I thanked Esdra and told him that I was fine looking through the books on the shelves and that I didn’t need his assistance.

  While the loyal caretaker was clearing away debris with a rake I could observe him through a window, through a thatch work of overgrown vines. But I did not think that the loyal caretaker could see me.

  Her against you. No mercy.

  “My God!”

  From a shelf I pulled two old, indeed antiquated volumes—Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus. The pages were desiccated and the bindings badly worn but the date was 1823—a true collector’s item. I had no idea what such an edition would cost in today’s market but supposed it was well beyond the price of my entire “first edition” library at Mill Brook House.

  Beside the Frankenstein volumes was an equally antiquated copy of The Last Man, 1826, signed by Mary Shelley; beside this, volumes by Bram Stoker—Dracula (1897), The Lady of the Shroud (1909), The Lair of the White Worm (1911). All were signed by Bram Stoker, the inked signature faded but still legible.

  Beside Stoker, several first editions by Sheridan Le Fanu including In a Glass Darkly (1872). I had heard of the prominent Irish Gothicist Le Fanu and knew of his great influence on Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I had never read a word he’d written.

  To my chagrin I was discovering that the Haider library contained earlier, far more valuable first edition copies of books which I’d proudly acquired for my library—a signed first edition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1899), where I had only a first, unsigned edition; a signed first edition of Algernon Blackwood’s The Empty House (1906), where I had only an unsigned second edition; signed first editions of Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone, The Woman in White, No Name—where I had only unsigned, later editions. And there was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Imp of the Perverse in a slender, much-worn volume, dated 1846—one of that troubled genius’s later, little-known works of fiction in the guise of memoir; or, was The Imp of the Perverse memoir in the guise of fiction? How paltry the acquisitions of Andrew J. Rush were, set beside the Haider collection. (Yet more shamefully, I have to confess that I’d read less than one-tenth of my library, in fact. I had done my voracious reading as an adolescent and as a young writer in my twenties. In later years it has become the possessing/displaying of books that mattered to me, and not the actual reading of any book however masterly.)

  Elsewhere on the shelves, of lesser interest to me, were leatherbound sets of the old, dutiful English classics—Collected Works of Shakespeare, Milton, Thackeray, Dickens, Sir Walter Scott. Volumes of verse by Byron, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Hardy, Matthew Arnold. Still, there were oddities—a dozen books by a writer of whom I had never heard, Ivy Compton-Burnett; at least a dozen by Iris Murdoch of whom I’d certainly heard, but had never read.

  Of course, I told myself that the Haider family was a very old New Jersey family, dating back to pre-Revolutionary times; one of the Haider ancestors had been an aide of General George Washington, another a governor of New Jersey in the early 1900s. As C. W. Haider had inherited this property in a still-distinguished neighborhood in Harbourton, so she had inherited these precious books. Perhaps her father or her grandfather had been a serious collector. No credit was due to her.

  Seeing the caretaker through a window, earnestly raking in the overgrown backyard, I slipped several of the rare books into my duffel bag—volumes I and II of Frankenstein, The Lair of the White Worm, The Turn of the Screw; cleverly, I rearranged the books so that there were no gaping absences on the shelves.

  She doesn’t deserve these books! She has not glanced into them in years.

  To the victor, the spoils.

  By this time the silky black cat had jumped down from its perch on the sofa, to approach me with a hoarse, somehow jeering yyyow—still swishing his tail, and still glaring with its eyes like gold coins.

  “Nice kitty! Are you—‘Satan’?”

  I laughed, for the name had come to me out of nowhere.

  “‘Satan’? Are you? Kitty-kitty?”—I stooped to pet the cat, for it was very beautiful and seemed to be inviting me; but it miao’d angrily, bristled its silky back like a Hallowe’en cat, and bared its teeth in a way that did not seem welcoming.

  “Go to hell, then—‘Satan.’ Where you belong.”

  The rebuff by Haider’s cat was hurtful for animals are always fond of me—dogs especially. Cats of course are notoriously less predictable, despite their beauty.

  As I explored the room more thoroughly, I saw that it opened into a kitchen (high-ceiling, old-fashioned fixtures) at one end, and a drawing room (shrouded furniture, dank odor) at the other. The degree of clutter here suggested hoarding, or rather the onset of hoarding: stacks of aged newspapers, magazines, advertising circulars and brochures. A singular stack rising from the floor, like a stalagmite, of old books including what appeared to be books from the Harbourton Public Library, long overdue. One day soon, the interior of the dignified old Edwardian house might be near-impassable. Narrow nightmare passageways for the madwoman to make her way through . . .

  Near the fireplace was what must have been Haider’s favorite place for sitting, a once-elegant Victorian chair covered in a cobwebby sort of velvet, with sagging seat like sagging buttocks; beside the chair was a table stacked with (surprisingly) recently published hardcover books of which not one but two were by Stephen King; I saw to my alarm that one was my 2004 novel Outside, In. (Had Haider been sifting through the sentences of this elaborately plotted mystery to see if she could discover “sources”—“influence”? I did not dare to take up the book, to leaf through it and see her notes. Best not to know.)

  What can the witch prove! She is insane, discredited.

  An injunction has been served against her to protect you.

  The fireplace was as large as the fireplace at Mill Brook House of which I was so proud, comprised of the same sort of fieldstone and stucco. This fireplace was filled with ashes, however—unlike ours, which was kept clean by the young Guatemalan girls who came on Mondays to clean our house. Brass andirons here badly needed polishing. Firewood was stacked on the hearth carelessly, as if it had been thrown down; an ax lay on the hearth, also looking as if it had been flung down. The ax was of another era, with a crude head and weathered wooden handle; its edge could not have been very sharp, yet someone (Esdra? Haider herself?) had been gamely trying to split small logs with it, causing a good deal of splintering. There was a pile of kindling also, covered in cobwebs, and some old, badly discolored newspapers on the floor. By the newspaper’s fussy font I recognized the Harbourton Weekly.

  In the gritty film of ashes on the floor, near the fireplace hearth, were myriad paw prints. You’d have thought there had been a witch’s Sabbath here—so many paw prints! But all were Satan’s, surely.

  The kitchen floor was covered in linoleum tile, unpleasantly sticky beneath my feet. The gas stove was very old, and its burners rusted; the refrigerator was a General Electric, that must have dated from the 1970s, and gave off a dull, guttural sound as of indigestion. On woven place mats on the kitchen floor—place mats that must have been fairly expensive—were at least five cat dishes, containing food and water; it seemed clear that Esdra kept his mistress’s black cat well-fed and watered. And in the rear kitchen door was a small, swinging plastic door, which had to be the cat’s. The spoiled
creature could exit and enter the house at will, it seemed.

  Why was I thinking suddenly of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat”—the creature that is beloved by his master, yet for no clear reason strangled to death by his master and shut up inside a wall; and out of that wall issues the (dead) animal’s bloodcurdling caterwaul, to drive the master insane . . .

  “That won’t happen to me.”

  (Why did I say this aloud? In fact, did I say it aloud? Sometimes I am not sure if I have spoken to myself, or only just thought something. Or, if someone else has spoken to me.)

  Haider’s kitchen had probably not been renovated for decades. There was an aroma here of rancid food, spoiled milk and rotted fruit; grime, dust, sorrow. Yet, the aroma was not altogether unpleasant, like the smell of an old blanket that has been on your bed for years and has been rarely laundered.

  Here too, you could see that the wild-white-haired Haider had a favorite chair at the plank-topped table. Of several chairs, just one had a (grimy) cushion, and faced, on a counter, a television set so small it looked at first like a toy. Overhead, a ninety-watt lightbulb hung down on a chain, unadorned. I felt a pang of pity for the lonely spinster—Haider must have eaten her solitary meals here, and tried to read, or watched TV.

  I had the idea that it was Haider who was estranged from her relatives, and not the reverse. Younger relatives would have imagined that the elderly woman would one day leave them something in her will. Still, I felt sorry for her.

  It is not your fault that the woman is the enemy.

  It is not your fault, the woman tried to publicly destroy Andrew J. Rush.

  This was true! I could not forget this.

  I returned to the other room and took from a bookshelf one of the dingy old volumes by Le Fanu to slip into my duffel bag. Also, a copy of H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, which I had not noticed before, and which was surely a collector’s item like the others. And—for I’d been unable to resist, the slender volume The Imp of the Perverse. Outside the window, oblivious of such blatant theft, the faithful caretaker was raking debris into piles.

  She will never miss any of these. She is rich, careless—she does not deserve such treasures.

  After I’d set the tinsel-wrapped box onto Haider’s desk I’d stepped quickly away, and had avoided that part of the room. I was fearful that the wild-white-haired woman’s aura emanated from the desk—frustration, failure, fury, madness—and to breathe in this aura might infect me.

  Prominent on the desk was an old-fashioned Remington typewriter, a heavy office model; placed about the typewriter were neatly typed manuscript pages. (Out of a terror of being infected I did not want to glance down to see the title of any manuscript of C. W. Haider.) On a high shelf above the window, running along the length of the wall, arranged chronologically, were Haider’s journals—dreadful to see, so many journals, from the 1960s through the decades, diligently, doggedly, to the present time—2014. Even if I could have reached up easily to seize one of these journals I had no wish to glance into it. In a small bookcase beside the table were C. W. Haider’s own works. The very oldest, dating to the 1960s, were school publications in which poetry and prose by “Corin Wren Haider” appeared. (So that was the name of my nemesis! “Corin Wren”—a name to evoke pitying smiles among classmates.) There were self-published books, some of them lavishly designed, with C. W. Haider on the spines. The first, presumably the oldest, was titled Haider & Haider: A Potpourri of Verse—a joint authorship of W. J. Haider & C. W. Haider—father, daughter? The publication date was 1973.

  Out of curiosity I stooped to scan other titles in the bookshelf—one, in gilt lettering, was Criss-Cross!

  This was a stunning discovery, like a blow to the heart.

  How was it possible that C. W. Haider had written a seventy-page novella titled Criss-Cross, published by a vanity press in 1999—the very title of my novel-in-progress, which had been giving me such trouble for the past several months . . .

  Had Haider “donated” copies of her books to the Harbourton library? Was it likely that, altogether innocently, I’d happened to see the intriguing title on a bookshelf there one day, of which I had no memory?

  Truly, I didn’t think so.

  I had thought Criss-Cross was an ideal title for my novel, which was to be one of my strongest, most ingenious novels. An inspired title I had not chosen easily. And I could not change it now, for the plot’s structure reflected the title, and vice versa.

  Andrew J. Rush, known as the gentleman’s Stephen King, has created an unusually clever and original plot for his twenty-ninth novel . . .

  In an intriguing stylistic departure from his previous work, Andrew J. Rush, the “gentleman’s Stephen King,” has surprised us with . . .

  So I had fantasized early reviews.

  Possibly even my first full review in the New York Times.

  (Shamelessly, I’d even fantasized that Stephen King might review Criss-Cross on the coveted front page of the New York Times Book Review. But now I seemed to know that would never occur.)

  Now, Criss-Cross seemed to jeer at me. But after months of labor I could not imagine changing the title . . .

  C. W. Haider would be furious when she saw that I had “stolen” this title. Despite the injunction, she might pursue me again. I hoped it would not provoke the madwoman to anything desperate.

  So far as I knew, Haider had never come out to Mill Brook House. She had yet to “stalk” me as Elliot Grossman had predicted she might.

  If she enters your residence to threaten you, you have the right to kill her.

  If she has cast a curse onto your life, you have every right to defend yourself.

  By this time I was sitting in Haider’s writing chair, for my knees had grown weak. This was a straight-backed dining room chair with a soiled chintz cushion. I made no effort to see what new project Haider was working on—(I dreaded being “influenced” as I would dread being exposed to Ebola)—but I could not resist scanning the brave little library of self-published books by C. W. Haider—there had to be at least as many as my own books, which were published by an “authentic” publisher.

  Here was another novella-length book with an intriguing title—The Glowering (1974).

  Out of curiosity I skimmed the first chapter. And then the second, and the third . . . Hairs stirred on the nape of my neck for the story depicted an idealistic young woman mystery writer named “Corrin Wingate” who (naïvely) accepts a position as caretaker of a remote luxury hotel in the Adirondacks at Styxl Lake, purportedly north of Saranac Lake, during the off-season when the hotel is snowbound. The young woman is not only a “gifted” writer but has the gift of “the Glowering”—i.e., “second sight.” (She can see into the future, though not clearly; she can have no power over changing the future.) The young woman writer takes a cousin-companion with her to Styxl Lake, and each of the young women brings her pet cat; soon after their arrival at the majestic Hotel Styxl they are beset by hallucinatory/demonic presences; soon, the young woman writer is unable to write, and she and her cousin-companion begin to succumb to paranoid fantasies . . . Though written in an annoyingly florid style, quaintly “poetic” in the worst meaning of that word, The Glowering told a gripping story of disintegration in the wilderness; though the chapters were overlong and absurdly melodramatic, each chapter was a self-enclosed scene, passionately rendered. A scene in which the writer’s pet cat becomes infected by a demon and turns first against the other cat and then against its mistress was particularly spellbinding—and terrifying.

  The Glowering had been published several years before Stephen King’s The Shining (which I knew to be 1977—I’d been impressed, as a young writer.) How strange!

  Could it be, the young Stephen King had in some way appropriated C. W. Haider’s unknown The Glowering? It was impossible to believe, and yet . . .

  Another novella by C. W.
Haider in the bookcase was ­titled The Shadow Self. This ninety-page work of fiction hadn’t been published, apparently; the typed manuscript was bound in marbled boards and dated (in ink) February 1983. A quick skimming of its (overwrought, “poetic”) pages suggested that this was a Gothic tale of an idealistic young woman mystery writer (“Carroll Wheeler”) who has been overtaken by her (male) pseudonym, or alter ego: the (male) writer publishes novels of “sickening, lewd horror” while the (female) writer publishes “well-received literary fiction”; the (male) writer begins to achieve commercial success, while the (female) writer achieves only critical acclaim, and a scattering of prizes. In an effort to exorcise the (male) writer, the (female) writer burns his books and sweeps the ashes into a swampy pit; after only a few days of “refreshing, joyous freedom from the shackles of evil” the (female) writer is overwhelmed by the (male) writer who has somehow (not clear how) managed to murder half the population of the “historic” New Jersey village that is the novella’s setting. An absurdly melodramatic horror story which (I must confess) I couldn’t finish though its plot was certainly familiar to me—in outline, very similar to Stephen King’s The Dark Half which had to have been written years after C. W. Haider’s The Shadow Self.

  Again, it was preposterous to think that Stephen King had somehow had access to Haider’s (unpublished) novella. Even if the desperate would-be writer had sent the manuscript to him, King wouldn’t have glanced into it; if he’d glanced into it, King wouldn’t have read more than a paragraph or two, for the prose was typically overwrought and “elevated.”

  Carefully, I put The Shadow Self back on the shelf. I did not want to think—(I was not going to think)—of my own increasingly uneasy relationship with Jack of Spades.

  On another shelf was a similarly bound manuscript, C. W. Haider’s Sister Witches of Hecate County (1979), which would seem to have predated John Updike’s The Witches of Eastwick. (I recalled that Grossman had told me laughingly that Haider had tried to sue Updike.) And there was Haider’s Ghost-Tales of the Chilliwick Club (1974), a lengthy novel with a complicated chronology and numerous characters which must have predated Peter Straub’s notably complicated Ghost Story by several years.