The Well

by Jack Cady

  She stood to pull her chair closer to the fire. She seemed younger every minute, and Tracker could swear that she was adding weight. Vera was not tall, her weight always came from her tongue.

  “I told the old scut to follow you. Go to him, I said. Thrash out the difference. Lay the dead.”

  “What dead?” He over-reacted.

  She saw it and smiled. “You don’t know,” she said, “despite it belongs at your feet. Despite they’re laying all around you. You run away too soon.”

  He was amazed to find she still owned her old power to harm. Forgotten feelings of hurt and inferiority were crawling through him like worms.

  “I was a kid,” he told her. “Between my mother, who was known as a bitch, and my father, who had at least one shot of sanity, I got sprung from this place — ”

  “And came back, little man. You came back and then left.”

  “I turned my back on this rat’s nest — ”

  “Run.” Her voice was a wellspring of spite. “Coward. You run from a fortune. You could of had it all.”

  “I’ve got it all, anyway,” he lied. “And damn you.”

  “To the well, sonny.”

  Her eyes told him she was winning. The old pattern was re-established. She hit him bare, naked, and he did not understand how she was hitting. He only understood that he was frozen in place. She was gaining weight by making him hate her. He forced himself to breathe.

  “This lousy place,” he said. “You sorry people.” He watched the effect. She was pleased. There was more color in her face.

  “Nothin’ you say makes a difference,” she said. “You run to new things, new people, big ideas…but none of ’em are. Just the same old buggers with nary-a-nothing in their heads. I know you.” She spat into the fire. Impressive. Now she even had spit.

  “I’m hungry.” Her voice changed. It was whining.

  “So go to the kitchens.”

  “I et everything there.”

  “All right. Where is it?”

  “Where would it be?”

  He was turning to go and stopped. “How should I know? I’m in the middle of a madhouse.”

  “Lower pantry on the south side. There’s cans.”

  “Any changes before I get there?”

  “Don’t take nothin’ from in front. The old bastard stuffed them with poison.”

  “Any changes? Tell me or I won’t go.”

  “In twenty years?” She sat thinking. “Nothin’ bad. He did most of his tinkering on fourth floor.”

  Tracker turned and left. Outside, he told himself, the wind was blowing across the snow-filled sky and there were automobiles skidding back and forth. Where it wasn’t snowing, like maybe in Bermuda, buildings were being built. There were hospitals, and whorehouses, and banks. There were churches. Women were buying dresses, and men were looking at the legs of women who were wearing their new dresses. There were land deals. There were people cheating each other. There were oceans and forests and bulldozers, and in this house none of it made the least difference.

  “You haven’t changed.” He yelled it at the top of his voice, tasting his own hatred, taking an exact pleasure in breaking the silence of the endless rooms.

  The answer came back needle-tongued, mocking. “I kin take care.”

  He slammed doors to violate the silence, knowing that there was not a door in the house that could be broken unless you used a sledge hammer. Then he remembered his forgotten crowbar and turned back.

  The fire brightened as he reentered the room. The woman cast a heavier shadow from its light. She said nothing. Tracker picked up the crowbar, turned, turned back. “What’s that? What are you doing?”

  She was casting a double shadow.

  “Doin’ nothing.” Her voice was low, unafraid, but the mocking tone was gone. The second shadow lay like light smoke beside the heavier, actual shadow. He did not see how it could be a trick of the light. As he directed the beam of the flashlight the shadow faded, and he could no longer tell if it was real or only illusion. He could almost swear, though, that it was the shadow of a younger woman, and the hair was piled high.

  “Who?” The fear was back like frost along the edges of his teeth.

  “I’m hungry.” She turned. The real shadow turned with her. “Hungry, hungry.” The whine was coming back. “I kin take keer.”

  “Witch yourself something to eat.” He headed for the doorway, turned the knob, found it locked.

  “Open it.”

  “No.” She stood. The lap robe fell. She threw away the covering afghan. “They’s nothin’ wrong. It’s you. You’re as full of beans as the old one ever was.” She trembled, moved one faltering pace, then sat back down in the chair. “I’m hungry.” She reached to press a lever by the fireplace. The door clicked. He turned the knob, found it open, came back. She looked colder. Her trembling hands were in her lap. She was weak, pathetic. His logic told him he was a fool. His hysteria was hitting him with shadows that ought to be easy to explain. Illusion, delusion…still, his rational mind also told him to be careful.

  “I’ll get you something,” he said, acting it out.

  He followed a passageway that ran off on a forty-five-degree angle from the third room back. The passage began halfway up the wall. When the steps were folded up, the wall looked like any other wall. Tracker began unwinding twenty years of forgetfulness. His life depended on remembering. As a child he did not think of this as a concealed passage. It was only a hall that you climbed steps to reach.

  The passageway was dark. He used the flash and allowed memory to guide him. If he trusted automatic recollection, he told himself, it would be safe; if he tried to plan he would make a wrong turn. The flashlight showed the beginning steps and he switched it off. The steps must be climbed in darkness. In light they would so confuse that he would surely fall.

  He began climbing and was startled that the machinery was well-oiled and quiet. The steps wound off-center, rising and falling, twisting and occasionally on a tilt. He had to remember to always keep to the right. As he climbed he felt he was going down. The slight movement of the steps, their great number, and the twisting, alley-like corridor gave him an antique feeling of timelessness. Impossible to climb out this way. He climbed the steps down half a floor. At the bottom was a small room. He flicked the flashlight. There were stacks of canned and dry food, and he filled his jacket pockets from the back of the stacks. Then he turned to a blank wall.

  He kicked a baseboard. A small trap door fell open. He reached into the dead space in the wall and found three levers. When they were moved to form a Y, he reached further into the dead space and found a knob. A door fell open at his feet.

  He climbed down to a passageway that slanted upward, jogged off to the right, reversed, and at the top entered through a wall panel into a hall on the south side. He looked through a window at another part of the house. From the time of entering the first stairs until the time of entering the hall he had covered a lateral distance of less than a hundred feet. Yet he had been walking, walking.

  “Tracker walks…” Her voice came back to him. He looked down the empty hallway and cursed because he was afraid. He had forgotten to control his imagination because of his concentration on traps.

  “Get back under the grade,” he said to the empty hall.

  Vera Tracker was the source of some of his worst misery. She was a cut across consciousness. But she represented reasonable movement in this unreasonable and silent house. And for that reason he wanted to get back.

  The conventional hall led to a main hall in the south wing that connected with the rest of the house through the kitchens. He started that direction, saw two off-colored boards in the floor, and stopped. Something was different. He turned and walked back in the other direction.

  He passed a door. He
remembered that if he turned the knob and pushed the right side he would be in trouble. If he pushed the left side he would enter a conventional room. The right side went into a sealed passage that made two wide circles crossing each other. With no light a person would move until he dropped.

  Further down the hall. Press in two places with evenly spaced feet and you dropped quickly but safely below the floor into another hall that was harmless if you went left. Go right and it automatically sealed, to force a man into a passage that apparently went nowhere. Worse, it started wide and narrowed to a point. A triangular tomb if a person stumbled in and did not know that three paces from the beginning of the point a panel could be slid in a zig-zag. Both hands had to press the panel and describe a streak of lightning. That panel opened a door into a conventional staircase, except for the third and fourth step which had to be jumped; otherwise the steps would collapse the unlucky body into a forty-foot drop ending in the subcellar. Except for that the stairs were safe, and led a winding circuit to the third floor greenhouse, the one decent thing in this place.

  John was remembering more than he believed he knew. The house seemed a monstrosity, but at least now it did not seem senseless. It was fantastic, like the tortured shifts and balances of an otherwise well-run, self-determined mind. The obscure routes were clean and sane and purposeful. The designer’s mind was sound, granted that his premises were crazy. He felt that the house was a masterwork. Genius designed and built this place. It was only necessary to remember that it was a demonic, bedlam kind of genius.

  It was too bad the house could not be defanged and saved. A gigantic museum. A Golgotha of sought-after torment, not hell but purgatory.

  John shook his head, feeling the weight of the past.

  “You’re young, try to remember this, later you’ll understand…” His father’s voice sounded in his memory.

  He did not remember his father well. Still, some part of his mind must remember. Golgotha. Purgatory. Those were not his words. He looked down the hallway, heard a sound, turned, looked the other way and nearly screamed.

  At the far end of the hall a door swung open, paused in the apparent grip of an invisible hand, and then slammed again. If something moved through the doorway it was in the hall with him.

  He could not go forward. To run away in this house was certain destruction. He gripped the crowbar. It might have no value for defense, but at least it was hard and heavy and real.

  Down the hall and to the left another door opened, was held, slammed. Something or somebody was passing from one room to another, and they or it ignored him.

  Either that or it was another trick. A Tracker trick. He eased off. His relief was as shocking as his fear. A trick. John Tracker congratulated himself on a lesson well-learned but for a time forgotten. His grandfather could be trusted to return all acts, all intentions, with a trick. There was a new technology, this trick must be part of it. Heat switches, electric eyes, solenoids activated by the slightest pressure. He remembered the old-fashioned chemical activators on part of the second floor.

  He was no longer afraid as he searched for the loose board or the silent beam that his foot touched to activate the doors. Even when he didn’t find it he was not worried. It would be there if he looked long enough.

  Ahead of him was tampering. Behind him was tampering. He was in a trap. It did not worry him. What Theophilus could build, his grandson John could unravel.

  He returned to the far end of the hall to inch past the new boards. The doorknob was new. He examined the boards and door, then backed away and reached forward with the crowbar to hit the boards. The boards gave a little, then returned to their former position. Whatever happened would happen when the door was opened. He stood to one side, turned the knob and shoved the door.

  A silver-bladed sword snapped from the floor on a sixty-degree angle at the right height to catch a man between the shoulders. The point and about six inches of the blade were gone. The metal was shaved, a clean cut.

  In the entry, about seven feet high and four feet away, was a rack of flashbulbs. They were already burned out. The trap was simple. A man walked through the doorway, was blinded by the bulbs, jumped back onto the blade. The blade was useless and the bulbs were shot. Why mount a sheared-off sword?

  He walked to the kitchens, where it was warm, and he wanted to linger there after being so long in the cold house. Well, at least part of the heating system was working.

  He leaned against a counter and thought of what he knew about the logistics of the house. He tested a faucet. Water splashed. Then outside services were still connected, someone was paying utility bills.

  There was a generator somewhere. There were wells. He shuddered, looked around, felt a rush of fear. The generator was in the subcellar. At least he seemed to remember it that way. He had never seen the generator, but Theophilus talked about it at times. If there were huge tanks of fuel, then outside services might not be getting into the house.

  On the other hand, someone would have to maintain the generators. Tracker was annoyed. Shutting down services was one more problem to be taken care of before wrecking this place.

  He passed through the warm kitchens knowing that in this territory everything would be safe, and he wondered why his grandmother did not stay in the kitchens, where at least it was warm. Had she been walking and been caught in that cold room by a fit, or stroke?

  The woman seemed pathetic. Old, violent and ended in this house of decay. He opened a food cabinet and found it full. He opened others. They held a great variety of canned and dried foods. It was enough to last an old woman for a long time.

  His trip through twenty years of memory had come to nothing. His grandmother had not told him of those new traps. She was not in the room when he returned. He looked around. The house was like tinder, the wallpaper dry and faded, crisped at the edges. Here and there were small droppings of plaster dried to powder. He could hear no footsteps.

  It was a clear win for Vera unless she could be found. He checked his watch and felt an urge to spread the still burning fire from the fireplace onto the floor. But that would be murder, and he shook his head to push away the thought.

  She could not have gotten far in the shape she was in. Tracker started to check rooms.

  Pine floors, hardwood floors, parquet floors. The switching beam of the flashlight pierced the darkness as he moved toward the interior. In one location was a maze. He did not even bother to go there. If Vera was in the maze no one could find her.

  In the interior of the house, halls wound and disappeared in darkness. When he found light switches he turned them on. Between patches of darkness the bulbs burned like feeble streetlights in a fog, small night-sleeping bulbs that seemed to gather the darkness around them.

  He was headed north. Conventional traps lay all around him. He recalled them at the last moment, like the hunchy feeling before the recollection of a dream. Or like, he thought, a part of time slid sideways to let him see what forgetfulness long ago had shunted away.

  His flashlight beam searched one room, then another, danced across mohair and carpet and dusty drapes that gave an illusion of windows. A fanciful house. A house of mad fancy. He turned a corner and blue light glowed from an open doorway fifty feet down the hall. He walked, expecting a trick, opening his mind to memory so that no trap would touch him. He reached the open doorway through which the light shone, looked inside the room, was stunned.

  Theophilus Tracker stood in a cloud of steam and smoke, open-mouthed, screaming in total silence. An apparition which carried in its hands the full rack of horns from a deer, an apparition that was steady in the rigid beam of the flashlight. Steam rose. The blue, sketchy light began fading to black.

  John Tracker, grandson of Theophilus, grandson of a spectre, ran. He was too frightened to scream.

  Past rudimentary traps that failed when he t
ripped them, if he tripped them. Past the picture of his father, Justice. Past the ornate coffin, to leap the trap at the front door and fall into the snow. He ran to the grade and climbed frantically, floundered over the grade and slid to his car. As he disappeared, lights burned on the fourth floor, the angel took another walk past the seven doors in the front of the house. This time its stern injunction was confused. It presented the cross, but the cross was changed in the angel’s wooden hands. It challenged the grade, but it was held upside down.

  The snow and wind murmured, like the questioning voices of generations of the dead.

  Chapter Five

  John Tracker’s mother was Sarah Lily. Sarah, who hated the house of the Trackers, was in some way its spiritual counterpart. In those winding halls and passages, the dwellers often seemed unable to tell which was illusion, which real. In much the same manner Sarah Lily lived her life.

  She was born in Andover, Massachusetts, and died at age sixty-one in Indianapolis as she lay beside her fifth husband who was a retired stock broker. He assumed she had a stroke. John Tracker was in St Louis at the time. He did not return for the funeral. He told h1mself that he was forever done with his family. Illusion has always been a Tracker specialty.

  Sarah was buried with the dignity that her fifth husband’s modest fortune could buy, but her casket shivered and stuck against a rock or root as it was being lowered. It was raised, the path cleared, and then it was carefully placed.

  In the family of the Trackers, women were traditionally treated in one of two ways. Either they were considered useful property, or they were worshipped. That was one reason Sarah always existed for John’s father, Justice, as a silver-laughing. Incredibly beautiful haunt that thrilled along the corridors of memory. John’s father loved only one woman in his life, although from time to time he tried to love others. He never understood the woman he loved.