The Well

by Jack Cady

  Nothing happened.

  He pounded with the crowbar, the blows muffled as he struck the snow-covered porch. Then he brushed away the snow. Thin, lightly painted-over lines showed the trap. The safety was on. His memory was correct. This was the door he once used as a child. It was also the original trap built by his great grandfather Johan.

  He stepped through the doorway, hit the crowbar against, the floor in front of the entry. Everything was sound. From this point it should be easy as long as he stayed in remembered areas. Remembering those parts should not be difficult. For a Tracker, learning to walk through the house of the Trackers was as drilled by rote as when other people learned multiplication.

  The late afternoon light did not greatly illuminate the hall. The old hex-mark-covered coffin still sat in state at the end of the front hallway — another of the early contrivances of Johan. When the lid was lifted to remove the interred soul, the fake coffin would quickly tilt backward. Concealed hay hooks were set to rise and lift any Devil by his privates. Over the coffin, if memory served, was a picture of old Johan.

  Tracker found a light switch. The picture was changed. It was a picture of his father, Justice.

  Except for the coffin and the picture, the long hallway was empty. Halfway down the hall a doorway led to the right. Further down another led to the left. There were three concealed passages leading from the hall. Tracker walked the length of the hall to look at the portrait of his father.

  The portrait showed his father at about age fifty. Tracker could almost feel, but not see, how such an obese man could represent the lean ascetics of religious theory. Like his son John, Justice Tracker burned away fat and kept in shape, but this picture showed him fat. The face was jowly, the hair long and curling about the ears; the thick lips were relaxed, the eyes were not. There was strength and depth in the eyes that declared the subject was beyond easy fanaticism. No, Justice Tracker was not a crazy man. He was not a fundamentalist preacher either. The hands were not fat. They appeared strong and loosely folded. The subject seemed deliberately attempting to conceal their strength and tension. Tracker’s first impression of the picture was that his father, while sane, looked like a man ridden by an obsession.

  John turned away, trying to will himself to feel nothing and not making a good job of it. He had avoided seeing his father for years, and then his father had been reported missing, the news coming through a lawyer. John felt regret, loss and guilt, but at the time he did not understand the feelings.

  He understood them now. In the whole world, for all his life, only one person never lied to John Tracker. That person was his father Justice. True, there were times when John needed support and Justice could not help — either he had not been present or he was inept — but John always felt that his father loved him, and that he never lied.

  Now his father was either dead in one of this house’s many traps, or he was a drifting, dying old man along some street of choked gutters.

  Who had painted that picture?

  He stood in the empty hallway and thought about it. Most likely Theophilus, his father’s father. The other possibility was a self-portrait. His grandmother Vera had different talents. John turned back. The painting was unsigned.

  A sensation as old as his childhood went through him. Something was different about the portrait. Between his first look and the second, something was changed. He looked closely. The eyes were the same. The position of the hands was the same. The change had something to do with color.

  Tracker stood there, stunned. It was happening again. He blinked hard. After all these years, and after the fight against mental darkness, it was happening again.

  He could almost hear the voice of the psychiatrist explaining to a child that time did not shift. Still, there were reds in the background of that painting the first time he looked. Now the reds were gone.

  “We teach ourselves how we will see,” the doctor once told the child. The psychiatrist was a woman of around fifty, and she was kind. He visited her every week when he was age eleven.

  “When we are born,” she said, “our eyes actually see upside down. After we use our eyes for a while, our minds learn to turn the picture right side up.”

  To an eleven-year-old it should seem no stranger than anything else. But even at age forty, and understanding a little about optics, he felt what he had felt as a child — disbelief. He had not believed her. At age eleven he believed nothing. His father told the truth, no doubt, but his father was also so removed, so abstracted that John could not understand much of what he said. And every time anyone else told him anything it always turned out to be a lie.

  In the house of the Trackers it seemed that time shifted. There were, though, other possibilities. He had to think about them. This was crucial. He did not give much importance to traps. He did not give much importance to history. What he could not bear was to be without control.

  He waited for the apparent time shift to be over. From the distance came a low murmur of voices. Light music tinkled somewhere. From a concealed doorway at his back came the joyful laugh of a child. His own childself laughing at some long forgotten joke?

  Silence descended like a weight. He could hear himself breathe, hear his belly gurgle. The silence raked his mind. Then the shift ended as quickly as it started. The silence became normal silence.

  He looked at the picture. There were no reds in the background. He was seeing an unfinished painting; the work was in an earlier stage of its production.

  Several possibilities occurred and he examined them all.

  It might well be that time did shift. It was against experience, and maybe it was against science. Time never shifted anywhere else. Or…maybe it did shift. For a moment he almost heard his father’s explaining voice. At some time or other in the past, his father had given a reason for this. Of course, his father had been strange…Or, it could be that he was hallucinating sound and silence. Tracker once had good reason to understand abnormal psychology. He could see how his mind, repressing fear on returning to the house, could be using the outlet of hallucinating old experiences.

  It could also be that he had looked too carelessly at the painting in the first place. It was at least fifty percent possible that his eyes saw red where there was no red. Painters knew how to get the eye to cooperate in the composition of a work. Even advertisers knew that.

  And it could also be that John Tracker still shared the madness of the Tracker family. He sure as hell did not want to believe that.

  “So just stop it,” he told himself. “You operate normally in a normal world.

  “And you,” he said to the picture, “you’re dead.” He did not know whether he was talking to his father, or his grandfather. The sentence of death seemed surer for his grandfather.

  “Remember that you are in a circus,” he said to himself so loudly that his voice echoed in the empty hall. “This is a place of low clowns, a sideshow. It’s a place where the freaks have genitals for brains.” He almost smiled at that.

  He ordered himself to be calm. He was in this house for sane reasons. He must make sure it was abandoned. He wanted to see if there was a way to put the house on safety so that a wrecking crew could take it apart.

  The third reason was both practical and symbolic.

  Trackers made money. They always had. There was more money in this house than John Tracker might ever make in his life.

  Did he need money? That was a question he asked himself after his meeting with the state people and the senator. He had a lot. Did he need more?

  There were all kinds of answers. He figured none of them were correct, but all of them were a little bit correct.

  He was tired of wheeling and dealing. He told himself that he would not have been attracted to Amy, except that he suspected she felt the same. Money gave power to do whatever you wanted in a world that could be al
most as disgusting as this house. Somewhere in these endless rooms was a cache of money that would make his own business fortune look like small change.

  This house could not live without money. Destroy the house. Take the money. He grinned. He already knew what he would do with the Tracker fortune when it was found.

  He would build parks. He would design them and install them and maintain them until they were established. He would take the hoard of money and turn small parts of the world into green and private places. It would deny everything this house and its people had ever thought valuable.

  This house and these people had nearly destroyed his life. For years he spent dark nights, dark thoughts, in a struggle toward understanding. He still did not have this house and the people of this house driven from his mind. There was that damned involuntary snail-like sound. He was afraid that someday other people might actually hear it.

  Of course, he would get to design the parks. Maybe that was romantic, he thought, but it was also decent. And prosaic, as compared to the history of the Trackers.

  Tracker began to walk down the hall and through the doorway that led to the oldest part of the house. He passed through conventional looking rooms and thought that if you did not know better, you would believe this was just another old house where generations had lived. Of course, if you did not know better, you would find out fast how wrong you were.

  At one place it was necessary to step around a section of floor that, when depressed, revealed needle-sharp harpoon heads that would ram through the toughest boots; their hooks would hold the victim in place. In another spot was a pressure-trip that caused the room to fill with gas, Tracker tested the quality of his fear and was pleased to find that the traps and the angel and the ornate coffin had an almost soothing effect. They could be accepted for what they were. It was like being in a madhouse and knowing you were safe because all of the patients were locked in cells.

  Sometimes the rooms were staggered. You could only see from one room into the doorway of the next. Sometimes the rooms were in line, and it felt like you were in a partitioned hallway. The rooms were musty and close-smelling. Some held electric lights, others did not. In this oldest part of the house huge beams and rafters were exposed. He felt that he was walking through an enormous cellar, and it was cold like a shallow cellar. The house rose invisible above him, the massive rafters telling of the weight that towered into the scudding clouds.

  He saw the unmoving figure well before he could recognize its shape. Three rooms ahead, silent in the dim light, like a figure disappearing into the fading lines of an old daguerreotype, a shape seemed to huddle in a room at the end of one hall. Tracker took a deep breath, told himself that he might have expected this; in fact, did expect it.

  She was old. She was older than anyone else he had ever seen. She was old like undisturbed dust, or like the filament of crackling fragility that lies invisible on the surface of ancient books. She was as old as the dreams of presbytery, of necromancy, of praises that had once raised now tumbled spires. She was old like the echoes of pagan chants. John Tracker stood breathless with shock as he realized that he was looking at his grandmother.

  Chapter Three

  John Tracker’s grandmother, Vera Tracker, was a woman whose power was inherited from the past. John’s memory, nourished on childhood fears, had distorted and strengthened Vera’s power. If he had known its source he might have understood it better. Vera’s power went back at least three generations.

  John Tracker’s great great grandmother, on his father’s mother’s mother’s side, was a woman named Judith who was a witch. Judith was the mother of Maggie. Maggie was the mother of Vera.

  Witchcraft traditionally dealt in sex and mutilation, and although witch trials disappeared in America during the eighteenth century, witchcraft did not. Judith’s skills were rare, but they were not out of place in the south and middle-west. They fitted well with the voodoo traditions of some former slaves, and with the fading ghosts, man-killers and dark haunts of Cherokee, Creek, Iroquois and Huron.

  Judith bore the illegitimate Maggie, and kept the girl at her side until Maggie was fourteen and felt old enough to run away. Maggie received enough instruction to later pass on a distorted inheritance of knowledge. Judith died shortly after Maggie left, killed amid fire and steam in a boat explosion on the Mississippi while making passage to New Orleans. Tracker history contained a large number of tough and unique women. Being a Tracker woman had never been easy.

  Amy Griffith lay half hugging a pillow as if it might become a dear friend. The pillow blocked a view of anything from her right eye, but with her left she stared critically at snow which whirled before the hotel window. She was not a Tracker woman. She was not even sure that she wanted to become one.

  She had never had a house. Not ever. Now John was talking about tearing one down.

  She felt pleasantly sore, her muscles stretched from having moved against and with John’s weight. When he’d left to attend to the business of the house, about which he seemed awfully close-mouthed, she’d remained in bed for more than an hour. She thought there was nothing wrong with small luxuries as long as you did not make them a habit.

  Almost she felt guilty about feeling so good. Tracker was not the very best lover in the world, but he would learn. So few men were in her experience that she really could not set standards. For her, Tracker was best, except one. She rubbed her belly, the inside of her legs; stretched her legs and wiggled her toes. She was glad because her legs really and truly were quite beautiful.

  There was work to do. John was not sure how long he would be gone, but there was lots of time. She decided to do the work and then go to a movie. The newspaper was somewhere. She stretched comfortable and happy in the warm bed, then told herself it was time to move. If she stayed any longer the luxury would turn into indulgence.

  She rose to walk naked across the room and look from the high window into winter streets. A lot of traffic. A terrible winter. The winter was easier to take because you had an excuse to get all gussied up and dressy. She had a new coat.

  She found the newspapers. Plenty of movies, plus the usual war, politics, violence and sporting events. There were Hoosier debutantes, which was pretty funny. There were marriages, divorces, want ads, sales on mattresses and clothing guaranteed to increase men’s lust if you followed a particular commercial flag. Amy had been trying to fly her personal banner for a long time, but often admitted to herself that the results were not flamboyant. She was thirty years old, and though she could tell herself with reason that she looked more like twenty-five, even that age was bad enough.

  You had to admire John Tracker, whether he was highly skilled as a lover or not. John Tracker was already a success. He was even young. Age was different when you were a man.

  Well, she thought, she could have done just as well if she were a man, if there were no bad streaks of luck that came like punishments. As it was, she had a high paying job and she was respectable.

  It was nice to be naked. There really and truly had not been many men. This kind of nakedness did not happen often. Thinking of nakedness, Amy did not think of naked expression. Her experience with that was mixed. She figured that experience was best forgotten.

  If she wanted a lot of men it would be easy, but it was better to be a little bit lonely than promiscuous. She told herself she did not need a man, and that was proved.

  Why then, did she feel so good? She was not even sure she was in love with John Tracker, although she surely did admire him.

  She could almost count the reasons, like you added figures in a ledger. First, John Tracker was a good, quiet man and she was used to him. Second, he was respectable. She would not have gone to bed with a bum, because she already tried that and it didn’t work. Third, he did not make her afraid. Men, being the way they were, often did make you afraid.

  Dictated
letters were in the open steno book on the desk. Her shorthand was impeccable. Her skills were complete. She could even read two-day-old, cold notes. When she and John occasionally argued about a letter, it was always his memory that was wrong. It had to be. She did not make mistakes like that.

  She stood watching the winter streets, so far away down there, then picked up the steno book and flipped through to estimate work time. They were all pretty standard letters: “J. Lincoln, Manager, Bargain Dist TransAm, Dear Jim — expect two hundred cases of interior paint, seven hundred glazed aluminum sash, assorted kitchen furnitures (322 count) and about two thousand sheets of Jap panel this week. The drivers will be running splits for K.C. Riffle your inventory and top off their loads. Consigner is a construction supply in Medford, Mass. Cost sheets with the inventory. Have you solved your warehousing problem, yet? John Tracker.”

  She had a reasonably interesting, well-paid job and she did admire John Tracker. When you knew a man’s business, you could guess a good deal of his history. When that man hired business managers who loved to talk, you could learn a lot more. It paid to give attention to the way John Tracker had built his business, especially if it looked like something really good was beginning to happen between you and the man.

  Men were the worst gossips in the world. Amy recalled talking to the business manager who had worked longest for John Tracker. He’d told her that John had only a few thousand dollars when he left college. His stepfather at that time had been a banker. The banker guaranteed some loans, and then, the gossipy manager said, Tracker avoided the banker and the banking business. He paid back the loans, of course.

  The gossip also said that John Tracker had had so many stepfathers that it was hard to keep track of them. By the time the loans were paid back, that banker was no more than a memory. Next, an auctioneer won John’s respect — sometimes John still referred to the man when he was making a business decision — and John got a job with him and watched and learned and worked hard. The auctioneer came and went pretty much as he pleased, selling things for other people, taking title to nothing. His capital risk was small. When times were good his sales were high. When the market was off the price structure broke, but he had more to sell. Another thing John learned was that men made mistakes. Small firm or large corporation, men made overpurchases or bought stock that did not move. There was plenty of insurance stock around …Amy smiled and thought of one of their private business jokes. The saying went that sometimes the customers had to bat down the flames of somebody’s successful insurance fire before they could buy the goods. Tracker opened a discount consignment house to handle other men’s mistakes. He rarely took title, charged a twenty percent commission and business flourished. After a few years of hustling he had established warehouses in eleven cities. That way he could ship back and forth between warehouses to keep the merchandise moving, and could bump the load for shipping charges each time.