Dark Rooms: Three Novels

by Douglas Clegg

  “You owe the Mafia or something? Are we talking horse heads under the sheets?”

  Winston laughed. “That wit, oh, that Adair wit.”

  “Who do you owe?”

  “It’s going to sound funny, Ted. It’s going to sound really funny.”

  “Try me.”

  “You promise not to put me away? You swear you won’t shoot me up with tranquilizers and lay me down in a padded cell?”

  I ain’t sayin’ yes and I ain’t sayin’ no, I’m just sayin’ maybe.

  “A bokor,” the Old Man mumbled.

  “A what—a ‘broker’?”

  “A bokor. A voodoo man—a witch doctor—a black-magic priest -”

  “Bullshit.”

  “I didn’t believe it either, until I saw what he could do. And still I didn’t fully believe it. But now I do. Ted, I saw him eat a woman alive—I saw him bury his teeth in -”

  Yep, pop done cracked real good this time. You can see the fault lines erupting down the side of his face. He went and stuck his arms up to his elbows into a wasps’ nest and the venom went all the way to his brain. Just hope his will is in order and you find a nursing home comfortable enough for the old guy. He’s a bastard but even bastards deserve some comfort when they crack.

  “Sure, Pop, calm down, let’s talk, it’s okay. Where does this guy live?”

  Winston licked the pink swollen flesh between his puffy fingers. “Your guess is as good as mine.” Then laughing, tears coming to his eyes: “He’s dead, and where do dead men live, boy? Maybe all around us. Maybe they stick to one place. Maybe they haunt one place. Maybe a house. Maybe they never left the house. Maybe they’re in the house waiting for a crack, waiting for something to let them through, something oh so perfect, something that fits the scheme of things, boy, something or someone who would be the perfect way out.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  REVELATIONS

  1.

  While Hugh went to the garage Wednesday afternoon to pick up the VW, Rachel sat in the turret room reading the papers Ted had given her, she had put them away three weeks ago barely glancing at them. She’d thought it better not to mention to Hugh about Ted’s visit, and she was hoping that the legal ownership of the house wouldn’t come up until Hugh was in a steadier frame of mind.

  The turret room was still in the midst of a major overhaul: Hugh had scraped and steamed the old wallpaper off, and beneath that another layer of wallpaper that was only half removed. It was a cheap, shiny, yellowish paper that reminded Rachel of contact paper and was unpleasant to look at for any length of time. But if she sat at the cushion on the window seat she could look out over the park and read and not deal with the half-finished room.

  Below in the park, a group of old men sat talking on the benches, six school-children played a game of hopscotch on the sidewalk, the trees drooped heavily with the afternoon’s rainfall—it had only begun to clear at five, when Rachel got out of the subway at DuPont Circle and walked up Connecticut Avenue to Winthrop Park.

  It had been cool and she’d felt good, good about the beach trip they’d be making in the morning, good about Hugh, good about life. She hadn’t seen the crazy bag woman from the park—another good omen.

  She riffled through the white legal-sized sheets before her: boring, boring, boring, as Hugh would say. She skimmed through the domestic instructions: Your User-Friendly Trash Compactor, Frost-Free Refrigeration At Its Finest, Making The Most Of Your Three-Cycle Dishwasher. Finally, towards the back of the pile she came across a diagram of the house. Page one showed the floor plan of Mrs. Deerfield’s apartment: the sitting room near the front facing Hammer Street, then a brief, practically nonexistent hallway leading to the bedroom, the bathroom, back to the kitchenette, the walk-in closet, the breakfast nook—Rachel remembered that particular place, the Clamoring Place of Mrs. Deerfield and her weird girlfriends, the place where Rachel had all but passed out. It seemed silly to her now, and she knew that her hormones and her blood sugar were the culprits, but it had made her less anxious to go see the downstairs apartment again. There was something else, running alongside the breakfast nook—it looked to Rachel like a sketch of train tracks, and she thought it must be the back glass doors to the patio, or maybe it was something about the sewage pipes. Or who knows? Maybe there used to be a train running through here? I am a lawyer, not an architect.

  On page two, the diagram was of the second floor of the building, or the first floor of their house. She scanned it, the living room, the kitchen, the den, the turret room, the bathroom. There was a blur of letters in a small crawl space between the BTHRM and TRRT RM. Rachel tried to make them out: VNTY. What is VNTY? It was a space perhaps the size of a closet, and maybe again this had to do with pipes, because there was a brief doodle of train tracks in a ray out of the VNTY. So maybe pipes behind the walls.

  But there’s that bricked-up window.

  In the alley, between the brownstone and Draper House.

  Rachel had only gone through the alley on that side once—the first day she saw the house. It was narrow and dark and smelled of wino piss; broken bottles and tin cans sprawled across the concrete. But she had glanced up and seen the small bricked up window, like a closed eye, and wondered when and why it had been bricked up.

  And then she’d just forgotten about it, buried it in the back of her mind, probably because I dreaded dealing with the cleanup job on that alley.

  So perhaps there was a room there, between the bathroom and the turret room.

  Rachel looked over at the wall near the door.

  Behind that wall is a VNTY. With a window. And train tracks:

  She stood up. The yellow wallpaper-beneath-the-wallpaper was so hideous she wondered who would even spend the money on that kind of stuff. She walked over to the wall, pushing the door closed so she could imagine the whole space, the entire room behind the wall. She rapped on it, and the rap was hollow— doesn’t that mean there’s a room back there?

  Oh, but this wallpaper is so ghastly to look at, and she reached up, digging with her fingernails beneath one of the greasy yellow folds, tearing off a corner of the paper. The wall was a grayish white beneath. Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.

  She scratched at some more of the paper. More wall beneath, but wall with a red Magic Marker scrawl.

  This must’ve been some kind of nursery and some brat drew on the walls, so the mommy and daddy decided to put up cheap wallpaper in case junior went crazy with his Crayolas again.

  She scraped more away, peeling back a long strip of the ugly paper.

  Beneath it, a word was forming out of the red marker doodling.

  Rachel pulled more of it, and the letters HOU were visible.

  The kiddos have been writing dirty words on the walls.

  She thrust her nails beneath the paper and tugged.

  Rachel screamed when the nail of her index finger cracked, splitting all the way to the tender flesh. Blood rose up beneath the translucent nail. Shit, it feels like I stuck an ice pick under there. She sucked on her finger and then pressed down on the nail.

  But the fingernail had at least done the job.

  The strip of paper covering the red-markered word was hanging down below.

  But the word made no sense.

  Written in red marker was the word: HOUNFOUR.

  2.

  “Next month’s rent,” Mrs. Deerfield said, “August. You won’t be back you said until just before the first, and I thought you might like the spare change jingling in your pocket. I hope I’m not disturbing you—I know it’s late, but I heard the telly, so I knew you were still up and since you’re off in the morning I didn’t want to miss you, dear.” She stood there at the French doors; she’d come up the patio stairs, clumping loudly and rattling the railing as if to warn them of her arrival.

  It was after ten on Wednesday night, and Rachel and Hugh were playing Scrabble in front of the television.

  Mrs. Deerfield was wearing her turquoise oriental robe, her
hair turbaned with a pink towel: she had come right from the bath to pay her rent. She smelled like a walking ad for Yardley’s English Lavender, a pleasant change from the vinegary, boozy odor.

  Hugh said, “Hi,” but seemed more interested in “The Honeymooners” rerun. He glanced back and forth between his wife, his tenant, and his TV show. On the TV show, Jackie Gleason and Art Carney were handcuffed together on a train.

  Rachel held the door open—not quite an invitation, but she didn’t want to seem rude (and yet she didn’t want to invite Mrs. Deerfield in, either). “I hope the TV isn’t too loud?”

  Mrs. Deerfield shook her head. “No, I was actually afraid I might be making too much noise myself—I’ve been pickling and preserving like a madwoman, it’s really my passion, don’t ask me why because I couldn’t tell you, and it leaves the fingers a bit sticky—I broke one of my jars and then said to myself, Penelope, slow down, you needn’t do it all tonight, there’s plenty of time, it can wait, now, Penelope, go take a bath and get that awful sticky-smelly-gummy stuff off your skin.” Mrs. Deerfield looked in the living room. “I love a good game of Scrabble—who wins in this family?”

  Hugh said, “Usually Rachel. She’s got the brains.”

  “He’s joking, he always gets the most points.” Rachel took the check from Mrs. Deerfield’s small, pudgy fingers. “Thanks—that’s very thoughtful, but only if you’re sure you don’t mind parting with the cash this early.”

  “Not at all, not at all.” But Mrs. Deerfield was more interested in the Scrabble board; she stepped into the living room, Rachel moving back. “Oh, goodness, there’s that word.”

  The word HOUNFOUR was spelled out on the board.

  “You know what it means? Hugh thinks it might be French, although he can’t come up with it.”

  “After three years of high school French and a summer at the Sorbonne,” Hugh said. “But that’s assuming it’s a real word, too.”

  “It was on the wall in the turret room—somebody wrote it—it was under all that horrible wallpaper.”

  “You’re right, it does sound French, dear. I’d have to consult my books of mysticism, but I believe it’s got religious connotations, it means an altar or a place of worship. But I’d have to look it up to be sure.”

  “I say Rachel can’t use it in this game unless she can tell me what it is. I think it’s a made-up word.”

  “Like I made up the secret room.”

  “You’ve got a secret room, dear? How lovely—that’s one of the more enchanting things about old houses, there’s always a secret room, locks with no keys, hidden staircases, old dusty tomes in dark closets.”

  “Well, maybe no more than a secret closet. I saw some drawings of the floor plan of the house, and there’s something in between the turret room and the bathroom, just down the hall. It said V-N-T-Y on the sketch.”

  “Well, dear, that must’ve been the vanity, coming off the bathroom like that. Perhaps just room enough for a small dressing table. In the olden days, ladies of such wealth as the original owners of this house had to have their own powder rooms I suppose.’”

  “That makes sense: Vanity,” Hugh said, “thy name is -”

  “Say it and you die, Hugh, and it doesn’t make any sense at all. There’s a bricked-up window in the alley. Why would somebody close that area off?”

  Mrs. Deerfield nodded her head slowly. “Yes, why would someone? But this house is just a mess when it comes to rational thought. I’ve got that wind tunnel beneath my breakfast nook—it’s always cool down there and there’s no explanation for it as far as I’ve ever known. Although it’s excellent for storing wines and canned foods. I know you two don’t believe in the spirit world but I do, at times, and so I allow the irrational to connect the dots, as it were. Perhaps, after all, your vanity isn’t covered up to keep anyone out, least of all you two, perhaps it’s to keep something in.”

  “Oh, please, Mrs. Deerfield, between that crazy woman last weekend, the mice, and the roaches, that’s the last thing I need to help me sleep tonight.”

  “Sorry, dear. Ramona’s still on the lam. Any sign of her about?”

  “I think I’d start sneezing if she were in the vicinity.”

  “Well, I have a sneaking suspicion that she’s found some little nook to have her babies in already. I just hope she doesn’t cause too much trouble: there’s nothing prouder or more demanding than a new mother.”

  3.

  Rachel was brushing her teeth in the upstairs bathroom, mentally reviewing the list of things she had to remember in the morning: leave the keys with Mrs. Deerfield so she could let the exterminator in, the straw beach mats, the flip-flops, the sunglasses, the suntan oil, her make-up kit, Hugh’s shaving kit, a sweater, always take a sweater to the beach, mom would say, you never know when it might get cold, her skirts (the wraparound skirt was always the easiest to deal with at the beach), the sunblock…

  Hugh stood behind her, she saw him in the mirror, and at first it didn’t look like Hugh. His face was not really a scowl, but it was quickly becoming one, lines dropping right and left. “Our house,” he said.

  He was holding up the papers that Ted had dropped off.

  “Your house.” His voice was not a snarl, but she wished it was. She could deal with him if he were angry, but he didn’t sound angry.

  He sounded defeated.

  4.

  She lay in bed and massaged his neck. “Don’t let it bother you—it is our house. This is just something cheap your father did, but he can’t touch us here.”

  “Can’t he? Christ, Scout, can’t he? Do you know what he does to people? He chews them up. Any chink he can find in our armor, he’s going to do his damnedest to explode. He’s done it before to me, and he’ll do it again.”

  “Put it out of your mind, throw it away. I love you and he can’t touch our marriage.”

  “Really?” Hugh turned to look at her; a tense smile streaked like lightning across his face. “Really, Scout? Because he sure as hell touched my last marriage.”

  5.

  She closed her eyes after he told her, she closed her eyes and he fell asleep next to her, she closed her eyes and listened to him tell the story again and she felt guilty and happy and guilty because she was happy, because she felt freed from a larger guilt that had been gnawing at her since she’d first fallen in love with Hugh.

  And it was over now, they were home.

  Home safe.

  His words spun through her head:

  "I never told you this—and I guess you won’t blame me, Scout. When I met you I know you thought I was an asshole. One of the other guys on the Law Review told me as much. But when I met you, I thought: God, here is a woman with whom I could really be in love.

  Not like Joanna. Never like Joanna.

  Joanna was perfect. Bright, beautiful—she really wasn’t beautiful, not the way I’ve come to think about beauty. But she knew how to make men think she was beautiful, the way some actresses can. She was a debutante who had never gotten over that fact, and I was her escort. You know she and I met while we were in college, but do you know how?

  The Old Man arranged it.

  He hired this girl in the summer to work as a gofer at the firm, and I was spending my summers doing research for them. The Old Man had set it all up: here was a girl from a good family, she had style, she had panache, she knew when to keep secrets and when not to.

  I wonder if they had begun their affair before I’d even laid eyes on her? Sometimes at night I lie awake wondering, trying to imagine what kinds of conferences they must’ve held together, what kinds of strategies they must’ve worked out. How he bought her off—if she really thought she was in love with the Old Man, or if the thought of the Adair money was enough to keep her going back to him.

  And I was so naive.

  They must’ve been laughing about me. All along. But every now and then I caught her off guard. She’d be looking at me, absent-mindedly, her clear blue eyes filled with some kind
of joke. Joanna had the clear blue eyes of a born liar. Scout—per- haps I’ve got them, too, for not telling you about this. I just haven’t wanted to admit what a moron I was in that marriage, how far my head was up my ass.

  At times. Joanna would look at me and I thought she was adoring me. Can you imagine? Adoring me.

  She was laughing at me, of course. She knew what she was putting over on me, and I suppose the plan was in another few years to divorce me, or who knows? Maybe she was content to be his mistress and sleep in my bed. God, when I think of lying in bed with her and touching her skin—my skin crawls. the way hers probably crawled whenever I touched her.

  But I was a classic fool. I thought the kind of coldness I was feeling was normal to marriage—I thought that’s sort of what marriage was all about, you know, and everybody played along with it. You can’t blame me on that point: here’s a guy whose Old Man chased everything in skirts except his wife. So my marriage to Joanna seemed like paradise. My brother Ted tried to tell me once—he’s a snake, but he’s got that one ounce of decency in him—maybe it was a momentary lapse on his part—shit, I don’t know why I never picked up on it until it slapped me in the face. Ted told me, “Watch out for her, Hughie, she means different things to different people.” Something like that, and I didn’t get it. I didn’t know what to think, and Ted’s never been much of a caring brother…

  But, Scout, when I met you, I already knew the lie, the Let’s Pretend lie, and it went like this: Let’s Pretend you didn’t see what you saw and the woman that you thought you saw was not your wife and the man you thought you saw was not your father. It was a big Let’s Pretend, the kind that eats away at your gut until you are certifiably gutless.