Jack of Spades

by Oates, Joyce Carol

  And here was the unlocked window! With some effort, I managed to open it, just enough to allow me to crawl through. Luckily there were several large clay pots at the side of the house which I could stand on, to get sufficient leverage.

  And now—I was inside the house! The laser-light was ideal to guide me past furniture draped in ghostly shrouds. Though I was somewhat short of breath I made my way unerringly to the rear of the house, to Haider’s writing room. The smells here were familiar, half-pleasurable. It seemed very recently that I’d been in this room, dazzled by what I’d found on the shelves.

  I reasoned that C. W. Haider was sleeping in a remote room upstairs. I felt certain that the woman slept a heavy, drugged sleep. And she was alone in this house of course.

  It had been my plan to return the books to their proper places on the shelves, and to depart. If nothing went wrong the intrusion wouldn’t require more than ten minutes.

  But now that I was here, in this forbidden place, I could not resist seeking out, with the laser-light, another title on the shelf which I coveted—the volume of Dracula which I knew to be a first edition signed by Bram Stoker.

  How badly I wanted this book! And yet . . .

  Take it. Quick!

  Don’t be a fool, you deserve this.

  The volume of Dracula was in my hand, and in the duffel bag.

  Next, I was captivated by an unprepossessing volume which another, less discerning eye would overlook—The Dance of Death by Ambrose Bierce. Excitedly, I opened the dingy volume to discover that it was a first edition—1877—inscribed and signed by Bierce himself.

  My several Bierce books are second or third editions, not rare, and not signed.

  “I must have this.”

  (Ambrose Bierce was one of the writers I’d read with particular excitement and admiration when I was just starting to write.)

  And so, there came to be another volume in the duffel bag, with the others I’d intended to bring back to Haider.

  Somehow it was happening, without my having quite decided it, that I wasn’t returning the books to Haider’s shelves after all. And I was feeling quite jubilant!

  Of course. This is why you are here. Take what you wish, there is no one to stop you.

  As I directed the beam of light about the high-ceilinged room—horizontally along the bookshelves, then vertically; across the desk that held the formidable old Remington typewriter; across the wide width of the fieldstone fireplace—I saw, or thought I saw, a movement in the corner of my eye near the floor; but when I turned, the shadowy figure vanished.

  I reasoned that it was nothing—“notional.” An effect of the flashlight beam causing shadows.

  Next, I investigated Haider’s desk. Here was a true old antique of a desk—once, a beautiful piece of furniture, a gentleman’s desk; now rather battered and scarified. I saw that many of the keys in the typewriter were worn smooth, so that you could not discern the letters; I saw indentations in the keys worn by the typist’s sharp fingernails, and shuddered at the prospect; I saw that there were deep rings and stains on the mahogany surface, as if the writer had carelessly set down cups and glasses. Before I could stop myself I glanced at the title of a manuscript placed on the desk—fortunately it was no title of mine, nor one I would be likely to appropriate: Scourge of Hell.

  Though there was something teasingly familiar about the title, which slipped my mind for the moment.

  I remembered that one of the desk drawers contained some intriguing personal material of Haider’s. By flashlight I investigated notes, outlines, isolated manuscript pages, newspaper clippings, family photographs . . . Again, I was conscious of something, or someone, in the room, and when I turned quickly with the flashlight, a pair of gold-glaring eyes were illuminated.

  A hoarse cry erupted—Yyyoww.

  “Satan! Damn you.”

  Fortunately the cat’s cry wasn’t loud but rather insinuating, intimate. Where a dog would have barked ferociously to wake his mistress, and to frighten away an intruder, the sleek black cat was not greatly concerned, only rather intrigued by what I, his newfound friend, was doing.

  “Would you like to come home with me? Eh, Satan? You are a beauty. Poe would have loved you.”

  (It is not like me to talk to animals. In fact, I think that people who talk to animals are silly. But here, somehow, in the excitement and tension of the moment, I found myself speaking, in a barely audible voice, to Haider’s cat as if we were co-conspirators.)

  When I leaned over to pet Satan’s head, however, Satan shrank away like an ordinary cat, bristling his back, and emitted again, a little louder, the chilling caterwaul—Yyyow.

  “Shhh! You know I won’t hurt you.”

  I’d been removing manila folders from the drawer to sift through. I was noticing that a number of Haider’s photographs, which dated back to the 1920s, were of quite striking individuals; there was a common Haider prototype, with a hawkish profile, a pronounced forehead, sharp accusatory eyes and sardonic mouth. In several photographs were individuals of indeterminate sex with white hair like Haider’s, that seemed to stand out from their heads as if electrified.

  I selected a number of family photographs out of the drawer to drop into my duffel bag. Though I could not have said why, I thought that these personal artifacts could be precious to me; there were sections in Criss-Cross that needed amplifying with more engaging and original characters, which these photos might suggest. Also, I took a sheaf of plot outlines. Surely, Haider would never miss these.

  Now, you should leave. Do not stay a moment longer.

  Indeed, I was ready to retreat. The duffel bag was filled almost to capacity. But now I’d noticed on the ash-strewn floor near the fireplace, beside the ax and the brass andirons, a stack of cardboard files with sliding drawers. These I recognized as files Haider had brought to the courthouse containing what she’d believed to be damning evidence against Andrew J. Rush. I felt a leap of fear, and also of excitement.

  No. No time. Leave these.

  But I could not leave!—not without investigating these files. And they were too bulky to take with me, along with the spoils I already had. The flashlight I could shove into a pocket, but the other items were too large.

  Awkwardly I squatted beside the files. With a tug I managed to slide open one of the drawers.

  In the too-bright light from the flashlight Haider’s meticulously hand-lettered white note cards were almost unreadable. Were these passages from my books, set beside passages from hers? Was this the “proof” Judge Carson had tossed out of court?

  Maybe I could take some of the cards, a handful at least. Or maybe—I could plan to return to the house another time.

  No. Hurry. You must leave—now . . .

  But somehow, though I understood that I was in danger, and should flee while I could, I did not move. Squatting, hunched over, in a most vulnerable posture I was frowning over this fascinating material, when something nudged against my ankles—the bone-hard head of Satan. Naïvely I reached out to pet the beautiful creature, thinking that he was indeed a co-conspirator, and wished me well; but felt a sudden rake of claws against the back of my hand, penetrating my glove—“God damn”—and suddenly, in an instant, chaos seemed to erupt like an exploding comet very near my head.

  “Thief! Scoundrel!”—the hoarse voice was unmistakable, close behind me.

  Out of the air, the ax. Somehow there was an ax and it rose and fell in a wild swath aimed at my head even as I tried to rise from my squatting position and lost my balance desperate to escape as my legs faltered beneath me and there came a hoarse pleading voice—“No! No please! No”—(was this my own choked voice, unrecognizable?)—as the ax-blade crashed and sank into the splintering desk beside my head, missing my head by inches; by which time I’d fallen heavily onto the floor, a hard unyielding floor beneath the frayed Oriental carpet. I was scrambl
ing to right myself, grabbing for the ax (that was wielded, I could see now, by the wild-white-haired woman, her face distorted by a look of maniacal hatred), desperate to seize the ax, in the blindness of desperation my hands flailing, and the voice (my own? my assailant’s?) high-pitched and hardly human-­sounding—“No! Nooo”—a fleeting glimpse of the assailant’s stubby fingers and dead-white ropey-muscled arms inside the flimsy sleeves of nightwear, and a grunting cry as of triumph and fury commingled as the ax was wrested to another’s stronger hands; and again the terrible lifting of the ax-head, the dull sheen of the crude ax-blade, and the downward swing of Death once begun unstoppable, irretrievable plunging into a human skull as easily rent as a melon with no more protection than a thick rind, to expose the pulpy gray-matter of the brain amid a torrential gushing of arterial blood.

  And still the voice rising disbelieving No no no no no.

  III

  20 10-Year-Old Harbourton Boy

  Drowns in Quarry,

  Catamount Park. July 1973.

  No one blamed me.

  No one blamed me to my face.

  21 Lynx. November 2014.

  “Andrew! There’s more of the terrible news here.”

  Irina lay the newspaper in front of me, with its lurid banner headline—the first such headline I’d ever seen in the staid Harbourton Weekly.

  HAIDER HEIRESS MURDERED

  IN TUMBREL PLACE HOME

  Break-in, Robbery Motive

  Suspects Questioned

  We were at our breakfast table in a glassed-in porch adjacent to our kitchen. Through a haze of headache pain my eyes could barely make out the printed words and the somber photograph of Corin Wren Haider that had been taken years ago. A sixty-eight-year-old woman who’d lived alone in one of the grand old houses in Tumbrel Square, Harbourton, since her father’s death in 2003, murdered by an ax-wielding assailant who was believed to have broken into her house sometime after midnight with the intention of robbery.

  An ax attack! Irina shuddered, standing behind me.

  We had been seeing TV news of the local, brutal murder for several days by the time of the Harbourton Weekly publication.

  I had been hearing radio updates, “breaking news.”

  “The poor woman! You’d said she was mentally unstable. She shouldn’t have been living alone. And how awful, that someone who’d worked for her family, for so long, might be the murderer.”

  It was noted that Harbourton detectives were questioning employees of the Haider family. Relatives of the deceased woman were quoted saying that Ms. Haider frequently kept “large sums of money” scattered through her house, out of a distrust of banks. Though few details had been released to the media I knew from a contact at Harbourton police headquarters that the caretaker, who’d worked for the Haiders since 1985, was the prime suspect.

  This was stunning news. This was the truly upsetting news in the Harbourton Weekly.

  Look, it isn’t your fault. Andrew J. Rush is not to blame.

  You had no choice, it was your life or hers.

  Irina was murmuring what a coincidence it was, that the murdered woman was the very person who’d tried to sue me! And what an unhappy person she must have been, living alone in that mansion.

  “Evidently ‘C. W. Haider’ had written for the Harbourton Weekly and other local publications, years ago. She’d reported on the ‘arts’ and wrote book reviews . . . Oh! Look at her picture, here—taken in 1963. She was quite striking even before her hair turned white.”

  Irina had turned to an inside page. Columns of newspaper blurred in my vision. I shut my eyes, for I did not want to see.

  It is not your fault—remember that.

  Don’t weaken! Don’t be a coward.

  You took the ax from her in self-defense. Beyond that—you have nothing to repent.

  Irina continued to speak of the “terrible, terrifying” murder. The last such violent incident in Harbourton had happened in 1971—a drunken fight that had resulted in a wife being shoved through a plate glass sliding door. But nowhere near Tumbrel Place.

  “Evidently, Ms. Haider ‘feuded’ with her neighbors. And she’d initiated ‘many lawsuits’ over the years.”

  Through the throbbing pain in my head I found it difficult to listen to my wife.

  You did the right thing. No jury would convict.

  No jury would blame Andrew J. Rush.

  Since that night, Jack of Spades intruded into my thoughts persistently. For I had no other counsel.

  No blame. No blame. No blame.

  Shame!

  Unpredictably Jack of Spades spoke. At times his voice was thrilling, supportive. At other times, mocking.

  Shame shame shame shame.

  Yet Andy is not to blame.

  “Andrew, darling?”—Irina’s voice was tense—“what did you say?”

  “What did I say? I’m sure I didn’t say anything.”

  There was a pause. Irina meant to speak but thought better of it. Quickly we finished with the newspaper. No more ax-murder for a while!

  “Well. Shall I get us some coffee?”

  “Yes, darling. Please.”

  Irina went away. Such relief!

  Thinking of how, that night, just a few nights ago, I’d managed to escape from the blood-drenched scene.

  Astonishing to me now, in the seclusion and quiet of our beautiful glassed-in porch at Mill Brook House, that I had been capable of such action, in such desperate circumstances, so recently. That I, who was feeling now so lethargic, had been able to wrench the ax from Haider’s hands, and break her grip, and seize the ax handle in my own hands, and wield it—Not you who seized the ax, not you but another whose strength coursed into your body and redeemed it.

  Obsessively I’d tried to comprehend: Haider had been wakened from her sleep in an upstairs room, and had come downstairs silently to confront the intruder. No normal woman—no normal citizen of Harbourton—would have behaved so recklessly, and so vengefully. She had not been frightened for a moment. She had not called 911. She had wanted to attack with the ax.

  Many times since the incident I’d wondered if in the dim light she’d recognized Andrew J. Rush from his author photo. If she’d been surprised, or not surprised.

  I had been very quiet entering the house. I had been very quiet throughout. It must have been the malicious Satan who’d alerted his mistress.

  While I was examining the bookshelves, sleek black Satan had slipped away upstairs to waken Haider, and summon her downstairs to her death.

  Why had she given no warning? Why had she not screamed at the intruder, to frighten him away? To save her own life?

  She had been the one to want to crush a skull with the ax, in a vengeful rage. She’d screamed at me only when it was too late, when she was upon me—“Thief! Scoundrel!”

  The madwoman is to blame, and not you.

  Spotless as a lamb though blood-splattered.

  After I wrenched the ax from the woman’s hands it was not clear what happened next. Only vaguely was I aware of smiting her—raising the ax, bringing it down against the wild white hair—not to kill, but to save my own life.

  A strangled cry from my own throat—No no no no no.

  At once, there was wetness everywhere. A fierce hot blood-wetness, that spattered onto my face, clothes, gloved hands.

  Even as I dropped the ax, the body fell. The wild-white-haired head seemed to sink onto the shoulders, skull split and gushing.

  Frantic I may have tried to set her—the body—upright again. Tried to revive her—that is, it. But now a lifeless body heavy as a sack of concrete.

  “No! I didn’t mean it—please, no . . .”

  (Did I speak aloud? Fortunately, Irina was in the kitchen orchestrating our elaborate coffee machine.)

  But the woman—the body she’d become—had
fallen, twisted upon itself on the floor, in nightclothes darkened with spreading blood. She who’d been so vituperative, so condemning, was now silent—silenced.

  The crazed black cat was hissing at me from a few yards away, eyes glaring. If I’d had the ax in my hands I would have taken a swipe at it for I had a sudden mad wish to cut the jeering creature in two.

  “You—demon!”

  “And then, somehow I’d managed to escape—slipping in blood, gasping for breath, sobbing, shuddering—leaving the murder weapon behind, but having enough presence of mind to take my duffel bag, that was heavy with plunder, and the flashlight with its narrow, powerful beam—escaping not through the opened window in the drawing room but through a side door, that opened out of the kitchen into a pit of darkness beneath overgrown evergreens, and led to a path beside the house, that led in turn to the driveway.

  My car was parked a half-block away on Tumbrel Square. At a corner of property owned by the Episcopal rectory.

  Like an automaton I managed to drive my car through narrow deserted village streets, onto a deserted state highway and so into the countryside dark as a great ocean. By instinct making my way to Mill Brook Road and so to Mill Brook House where, in our darkened upstairs bedroom, at this hour of 1:40 A.M. Irina slept with no knowledge of any of this horror; and if she’d wakened, and saw that I wasn’t beside her in bed, she would have supposed that I’d slipped away to work in another part of the house, having been unable to sleep.

  Poor Andrew! He is so dedicated to his writing, that never seems to be going well though others, who scarcely know him, believe that he writes easily and without a backward glance.

  Downstairs, in a guest room, I washed my face that had begun to stiffen with drying blood. I removed my blood-soaked shoes, stripped off my clothes, and rolled them into a bundle, and put the bundle in a large black plastic garbage bag, which I would dispose of the next day in a landfill twelve miles away.