The Well

by Jack Cady

  He recalled the strength he’d felt when he’d entered this room — the strength of feeling that the unknown was discoverable. It was still here. “I’ll be in this same room,” he told her. “At the desk.”

  He went to the work area. The large, functional space was intelligently organized. Tracker opened one of the files and whistled into the muffled silence and the dull beat of the radio. It seemed Justice went first class. Here were heavy fireproof files in a fireproof vault encased by a fireproof building. More of the ledger-type books were in the files, and in the bottom drawers he found blueprints.

  It was the best of luck. It seemed that the entire house was charted. Traps were designated and trips shown. He turned to make a careful examination of the rest of the room. As he turned the radio seemed louder, the silence lifted. He wasn’t sure they’d been in one of these seeming time shifts, but he felt it was something he could no longer afford to worry about. If time really shifted, then there was nothing he could do about it. Worry and preoccupation only made him weak.

  As the silence lifted the room felt larger, safer. It was much bigger than it seemed at first. An eight-foot table beside a six-foot desk halved the room. The low ceiling was dark and richly paneled. Tracker sat at the desk on which lay a normal clutter of work, but it was work long forgotten. One of the ledgers lay open on the desk. He looked at Amy who seemed all right. He wondered what she was thinking.

  The ledger, he now realized, was not a ledger at all; it was a journal…“Not a question of price, at all,” he read, “for goodness, I understand, is free.”

  He flipped pages. It seemed to him that he could almost hear his father’s explaining voice. This volume was nearly filled. He read the last entry: “Will die, am dying, weaker than yesterday. The reason is in the mind of the old man — curious to be dying, father father burn it, burn…to get from under the heavy hand…Victory.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  In a world of few absolutes, Justice Tracker’s Journal ended with one. From the journal his death was certain. His ending, though, implied struggle, and thereby some uncertainty about the precise time and manner of his death. It was the usual condition of Trackers. Few in Tracker history exerted continuing directed force of a single kind. Except for one or two…

  Amy Snider was John Tracker’s grandmother on his mother’s side. Her life is almost completely documented because of an irony.

  Some years ago a cynical man attended a funeral in Boston. He watched the expensive hearse and flower cars, the rosewood and ebony coffin, the machine-cut grave and the waterproof vault. Then he strolled across the cemetery to his car.

  A large stone among many small ones marked Amy Snider’s last resting place. The stone said that Amy had been good and kind and just and loving, and never told a lie in her life. She had been charitable, merciful, noble, beautiful and wise. She was the giver of grace, hope, honesty and good work.

  The cynic decided to prove the hypocrisy of humanity by disproving the claims in this specific case. He interviewed every person who ever knew Amy Snider.

  And he found that Amy Snider was good and kind and just and loving, and had never told a lie in her life. She had been charitable, merciful, noble, beautiful and wise. She had been the giver of grace, hope, honesty and hard work. Everyone who ever knew her remembered her not with weeping but with joy.

  Everything was always changing, Amy Griffith thought, and that was the reason life was so uncertain, that was why, no matter what you tried to do, you always seemed to end up doing something else. Such thoughts went through Amy’s mind like the first curls of smoke rising from dry leaves that kindle a forest fire. She lay on the bed while John sat, quiet and intense, at the desk. The radio was too loud. She turned it down to barely more than a hum.

  She felt almost safe for the first time since entering this house. It was good to feel safe when you were so tired and weak. It was good, and lucky, to feel loved. Her thoughts jumped from present to past, from past to trying to plan the future. You could still have a baby when you were thirty, if you were married. Her mind rebelled against it, though. You could never be an actress and a mother both; except wasn’t it too late to be an actress anyway?

  She wondered if the real reason her mind rebelled was because she had lost the first baby. The man had been bad, she’d only gone with him because of the loneliness after Jim Randall left…and he had left, he had. She didn’t send him away. Not really. Well, he should have stayed, because then the other man wouldn’t have happened, she wouldn’t have gone through the hell of losing a baby, she wouldn’t be in this crazy house. She told herself she should be grateful. John Tracker was a good man, especially when you compared him to all of the crazies who were walking around out there, in here…She felt near to sleep, almost dozing, and from old and nearly forgotten recesses of her mind she whispered a Hail Mary. It was comforting, the drama of the words long since lost under repetition and habit.

  The air tasted fresher. John’s movement as he shifted in his chair sounded sharper. The vault had seemed almost like it was stuffed with cotton, and now the cotton was removed. Maybe she was dreaming. Had she ever really done wrong? Here she was, thirty, and had slept with three men and was not married to any of them. It wasn’t much, these days. Other women would laugh. She was not other women. She was herself, and herself was honest when she dreamed allowable dreams. Her first love was Jim Randall, but he might no longer be an allowable dream.

  She was casting and recasting a future, fitting out a new role. The trouble was that she remembered the past, and especially she remembered the lonely time with the bum…

  “I missed, I’m scared, it’s been six weeks.”

  “No kiddin’. I mean, no kiddin’.”

  “Listen to what I’m telling you.”

  “You already told me, baby. I’m sorry. You got a tough break.”…

  Not like last time, no more mistakes. No more millions of stupid words in company with executives and executive typewriters. John Tracker was not a mistake. John Tracker loved her, at least she was almost sure he did…and forgive me father for I have sinned…father, father, oh father, dear father —

  She did not want the memory. Her mouth tightened. She rolled on her side, huddled, and knew she must be sleeping because she couldn’t seem to wake. Other memories…

  Her father, Jefferson Griffith, showing up with a girlfriend. “This here’s my kid. Agnes, meet Amy. Amy, this is Agnes.”

  “What a pretty little girl.”

  A lie, a lie, I’m ugly with a big nose and they’re drunk, he’s drunk again, he said he wouldn’t get drunk again…

  She dreamed and remembered other voices and tossed in her sleep. Her father had caused the voices, voices of strangers or neighbors who felt sorry for her…

  “Kid, call a taxi.”

  “Kid, does Jefferson Griffith live here?”

  “Kid, he crapped out on the front steps. Again.”

  “Oh, father, dear father, our Father which art in…oh, father, you’re hurt.”

  “A scratch.”

  “You’re bleeding.”

  “Just like a Mick. Caught with a roundhouse. How can you get caught with a roundhouse?”

  But Jim Randall had loved her. For a moment he was an allowable dream. She stiffened, tried to rise from sleep, and then relaxed. It was John who loved her. The sleep deepened. Her face became calm. She lay wearing a longsleeved cotton shirt, a pattern of pastel stripes, tucked into a wool skirt which lay across the relaxed curve of her wool-stockinged legs. Her hair was loose on the pillow, full and long, accenting the now warm and fuller lips.

  When Tracker turned ten minutes later he couldn’t be blamed for watching her, loving her. He found that he was even loving the act of watching.

  Amy breathed a little irregularly, moved one foot which changed the pattern of li
ght and shadow on her legs. He wanted to wake her. Instead, he turned back to the desk, then hesitated, turned back and looked once more at her. At least she was safe. He must get to work.

  He forced himself to accept Justice’s death, his hopes in that direction passing almost without a flicker. At the same time he was excited by the notion that the blueprints could solve more than the problem of moving through the house. They could solve the grand scheme of the house. Looking at Amy, he felt his humanity, felt a sexual rush. His head seemed like a punching bag for vying emotions.

  He tried to shove Justice’s journal away. How Justice died, and why, was surely recorded in that journal. As long as he did not read the journal there was still a chance that Justice might be alive…irrational to behave that way, yet he was taking satisfaction in thinking irrationally while rationally knowing he was doing it.

  Besides, the blueprints were probably more important. If you were in a battle, as he now knew that he was, then it was of first importance to know the terrain. There was a madman out there in that house, walking, scheming. There was no question in John Tracker’s mind that Theophilus was still alive.

  He sat with a still folded blueprint in his hand, picked up a pencil from the desk, laid down the blueprint, and randomly marked on a legal pad.

  A face was forming on the pad. It started slow, began to peer through angular marks, circles, designs. The face became more solid. He felt he recognized his feeling of sadness as old and heavy, out of the gloom and forgotten loss that forced itself onto paper. He watched his hand make the final delineating strokes. And then he recognized the face, the face of the sorrowful man of the stained glass window who seemed to comprehend aeons in the very presence of death. He grasped the pencil, heard it snap. He pushed the pad away, stood, looked back at the sketch. The picture was of somebody, and then it burst on him as something he’d suppressed all of his adult life began to surface. It was coming in a flood. It was the beard and the leanness of the face that had fooled him. He had just drawn a picture of his father.

  There was no madness on that face. Only understanding, and, a sadness that seemed to ride like a vapor, a knowledge that understanding had come too late. But perhaps not for John, the son. Suddenly he felt corded and strong. It was a new kind of consciousness. Not smart, not clever. It would never bring ten cents on any market, but for a few moments his mind was flooded with the total awareness of a revelation. He did love his father. He did. And with that knowledge came strength of his own, yet undiscovered.

  It was also exhausting to have one’s mind work so well. For an instant he felt that he was going to understand every mystery that had ever hovered in his life. And he knew he would not. He did not know enough.

  Where to begin? He looked at Amy. He touched himself, his legs, dulled for so long he was forgetting they ached. He told himself that he was forty years old and ignorant as hell.

  But, that was just an expression people used. How ignorant was hell? What had Justice written in that journal, that goodness was free? Did that mean that goodness knew no bonds, or did it just mean that goodness was without cost? He resisted the temptation to pick up the journal. Better to figure out the ground you had to fight over. It was really that simple. Vera and Theophilus were in a war and had lost. Now he was in a war with Vera and Theophilus. Even if the old man had no vigor, Vera seemed in pretty good shape. She could make manifest whatever Theophilus schemed.

  The blueprints were like reading seventeenth century maps. Gaps lay in them like those white spaces on old charts that were once marked “unexplored.” Either Justice had not known, or felt compelled not to tell. Likely the former, because the blueprints seemed scrupulously honest in everything they did report. Justice had been a fine draftsman. Traps were lettered with explanations attached to each blueprint. John whistled under his breath. There were a couple of things that appeared impossible to beat. Again, examining the blueprints, he felt that the house made terrible sense.

  The past ran in his mind. Old conversations, old readings, heroes that walked through the tales and instructions of his father. John tried to remember all of it; could not, but names came to him for a moment. It was almost as though the names were spoken by Justice…Herbert of Cherbury, Fox, Brattle. He couldn’t remember a thing about any of them. As other names began to unreel he felt neither good nor bad about them… Calvin, Mather, Travers. He knew he was naming men who had walked through the light and shadow of times past with prayer, teaching or threat on their lips. He did not know if any of them were good or bad or only obtusely sincere.

  On the third floor the blueprints showed fewer and larger rooms. There were no blueprints for fourth floor. The house got more old-fashioned the lower one went, the subcellar a series of grottos and passageways and open unwalled places, doubtless earth-smelling and damp from a century of subterranean and sunless air. He looked at the blueprints, traced the passages; read the simple but effective traps…deadfalls, pits, self-sealing cells that operated at the tip of a counterweight. One was fairly sophisticated, a room that sealed and then flooded, the water coming from a huge well in the center of the subcellar.

  Tracker shuddered. He knew that this was the site of the other well — the well against which he’d been warned as a child…

  “Don’t go near that other’n.”

  Theophilus’ voice flooded the silent room, but it was his own imagination, John was sure. Still, it seemed that Theophilus was right behind the door. John got up, walked to the door and looked. Nothing.

  The blueprint’s explanation said that the well was poisoned. Of course, that would have been a long time ago, but John told himself that the well was undoubtedly still poisoned.

  He could ignore facts no longer. Someone was maintaining this house. Electricity was being generated. He turned back to the blueprints. There had to be a machinery room. He found the description of it in the subcellar, a fairly sophisticated rig run from diesel engines, which meant maintenance, though not necessarily very complicated maintenance.

  This fact of maintenance was one more argument in proof that the old man was still alive. There was no other explanation. The cellar had several interesting features he’d either never known or forgotten. One section of concrete floor and rising concrete pillars had apparently been installed long after the house had been built, straddling the subcellar to stand Herculean beneath the massive construction. Double walls ran like fences, and even with the rock-hewn foundations there was an enormous weight problem.

  The decomposition room was also in the cellar.

  Shocked, Tracker thought of skeletons as he examined the blueprint. It was a small concrete room. Johan had done a germanically exact job. The door must be a perfect seal, he thought, one that dogged down like a ship’s hatch. Temperature could be raised to one hundred twenty degrees. Fans cycled air from an intake, ran it over electric coils for the heat, exhausted it through the well in the subcellar. The pipe entered the well in the subcellar and then traveled downward to break free of the well and travel further downward. It looked to Tracker like the thing exhausted burbling into the river.

  Attached to the first description was a second, showing that the decomposition room was wet, water intruding as a mist from fine spray heads. Johan had contrived a hot wind in tropical conditions that would strip a body fast. Tracker read the description, which gave locations where the dead were interred. The long-remembered skeleton in the cell was Jude Tracker. Johan was in the fake coffin, Johan’s bones that had tumbled like dice. Johan’s wife Sara’s bones lay in a concealed compartment in one of the rooms near where John had seen Theophilus. No places were listed for Vera and Theophilus, naturally, and if his father was the draftsman here and his father was dead, then there was no surprise that Justice Tracker had no entry either.

  John looked at other features, then picked up a blueprint of terrible efficient devices like those perfected during t
he Inquisition. He was scanning now, missing most of what he saw. His mind rebelled against taking in anymore.

  He picked up the picture he’d drawn and studied the face, then turned to the long row of journals, chose one at random, hesitated and read:

  “What is to be said of a man who goes to a fine hotel and pays a higher rate for both himself and his wife (the man being then unmarried) and goes to the room to spend the afternoon taking baths, masturbating, listening to a baseball game on the radio, and getting drunk?

  “Once, when he was little, I slept all night beside my son because I knew that at least he loved me.

  “It is awfully difficult to be lonely.”

  Tracker closed the journal and turned to look at Amy, who was asleep. He felt tears pressing forward, tears he had denied too long. He was grateful that Amy was asleep and would not see.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The American branch of the Tracker family grew in a nation where first settlement was made by zealots who represented the highest development of the medieval mind. That mind had been dead in the books since the fifteenth century; but because a thing is dead in the books does not mean that it is not out there in the world — walking. It walked strongly through most of the seventeenth century, then fought from its knees through the eighteenth. Other theologies arrived, together with modern political ideas. But theology in America declined as the Civil War approached, and when the Civil War ended, dogmatic religion, unrelieved by theology, emerged....

  James Miller was John Tracker’s great great grandfather on his mother’s mother’s side, a preacher who broke jail to answer his call. His success came because he was intolerably handsome, with flowing blond hair, a pointed beard, and a figure like a masculine arrow of promise. The jailer’s wife released him.