The Well

by Jack Cady

  He sat there, drinking his coffee. The house was silent, waiting; as if it too had taken a breather to reckon its moves.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Tracker women have dealt with sex, and with gender, almost as poorly as have Tracker men. Few people in the family’s history have been happy in their acceptance of either. They have been trapped by illusion.

  John Tracker’s great great grandfather on his mother’s father’s father’s side was Alexander Lily, who thought all women were ladies.

  While she lived, his wife Mary enjoyed what few New England women were allowed to enjoy; loving respect and complete, devoted loyalty. After her funeral, scandal had it that Alex was in a Boston whorehouse attempting to bed every worker in the place. It was deemed blasphemous, but even slight knowledge of Alex concludes that it was his way of mourning. As a sometime artist he later tried to do a nude portrait of Mary on his bedroom wall, but his imagination distorted his subject into a sort of Madonna.

  If Mary had not died the story would have been different. She was an overweight, intensely active woman from Sudbury who laughed as a habit and made most people happy. It took three years for tuberculosis to kill her.

  The offspring of Alex Lily and Mary Chambless was Alex Lily, Jr, who grew up in a house peopled by a series of women, none of whom stayed more than a year. It was said ofAlex, Sr, that during one six-month period he bedded with four women daily. Not surprisingly this had an effect on Alex, Jr Prudery and the built-in constraints of gender once more entered Tracker history. With this tradition of confusion, it was not surprising, that John Tracker had chosen a woman who could not keep sex and gender separate.

  She should not have lost control and run, Amy thought. She should not have gone to that ghastly well, kneeling like a novice to examine figures cut in the huge block of black marble that sat flush in the floor and covered the well.

  She should not have disturbed the small piles of coin that lay on the marble, like eyes; or seen the heavy black steel cover of the well, tossed aside like an enormous coin. She should not have done any of that, and she should have admitted it right off instead of trying to keep it hidden. Amy sat before Justice’s desk. She thought it was like she was two people down there…one a little girl, and the little girl started to talk but did not make sense. How could she admit that?

  John was a good man, and now they were apart. If only he knew how much a second chance meant to her he would not be so harsh. If only he knew how much he meant to her, he would be here right now.

  Journals and blueprints were pushed randomly about the desk. The answer to their personal problems might not be in there, and on the other hand they might. If you knew a man’s father, you would surely know more about the man…

  “People get what they want,” she read. “If they really wanted peace and freedom and love and beauty they would have it.”

  Anyone who had lived half a life, as she already had, could tell how wrong that was.

  In her life events and circumstances were exactly ten years out of place. When it was time to go to high school it was also when everyone had to have nice clothes and money and clubs. The religious school at least made everyone dress alike. After school, though, you changed clothes and the competition began. Ten years too late. You had to have a great figure, nice sweaters and bobbity hair. If she were twenty now, it would be all different. She would not be poor because she had learned so much. She could have a good man…she leaned back and thought of Jim Randall. But John was a good man too, and her saying she loved him made him more a man, which was good. She meant it too.

  Amy flipped more pages of Justice’s journal.

  If you knew a woman’s father, you should be able to know more about the woman. Amy’s father, Jefferson Griffith, was a good man. He just had had no opportunities. He was just as smart, though, as this Justice Tracker, if the truth be known. Well, almost…Jefferson Griffith drank, so did Justice. Except…she had to be truthful…except for drinking there were really no grounds for comparing the men.

  She studied the handwriting in the journal — measured, steady, confident and smart. “In Salem of 1692 we see the same thing,” Justice had written, “young women and pubescent girls danced and accused. In that spring and summer the Devil walked. Salem created the Devil. In Salem village, and now here in this house, evil stopped being an abstraction.”

  Of course, blame it on the woman. At least Jefferson Griffith didn’t go out of his way to attack women like that. It was hard to be a woman, especially if you were not very young and pretty…this man Justice had a dirty mind, no matter how wise and knowing he talked, wrote…It was exciting, this notion of another chance. John would see that a second chance was important. For her, it could be the theater, where she could make a real contribution. Which was the most important thing that anyone could do. It had nothing to do with priests, though, or with religion or faith or the Devil. She nudged the journal across the desk. Religion was pretty easy. You believed what worked and ignored the rest.

  Silence. John would surely be back soon. He would pout some and then he would return. They would make up. Oh, she hoped that was true.

  They’d been in and out of this room a lot, but there had been no time for a full investigation. Desk, files, bookshelves were all pried into. That accounted for only half of the room. There was a closet with suits, a bureau, drawers in nightstands.

  If you really wanted to know about somebody you could tell a lot from what they wore.

  The bureau was uninteresting, though like all the furniture it looked heavy and expensive. Clean and folded underwear. Folded shirts with yellowing paper bands. Socks and a pair of cufflinks. The drawers slid smoothly, and then one stuck. The bottom drawer opened halfway, there was pressure, then it stopped. Amy felt beneath the drawer. An envelope was stuck there by aging tape that was cracked and peeling. She worked it free, held it up, opened it.

  A ring and a woman’s picture. The remnants of Justice’s marriage. She felt like an intruder, but she was intrigued. Plain ring. She put it aside. The picture had no writing on the back. She flipped it over. It was hard to tell about the age, but it was easy to tell about the beauty. The face was broad, high-cheeked, the hair coiled. It was an aristocratic, even severe face. Strong…the woman didn’t look like her, yet she had most of her features, including the thin, aristocratic nose. Slightly broader forehead — that made a difference. The mouth was full. Looking at the picture, Amy knew what the woman must have felt when she looked in a mirror. She replaced the ring and picture in the drawer.

  The standing wardrobe was as large as an old Victorian piece. This one was plain, though, just a large piece constructed of unornamented wood.

  Suits, jackets, pants. Justice had dressed well, conservatively. The colors were mostly dark blue and brown. Shoes were in the bottom of the wardrobe. A couple of hat boxes were on the shelf.

  She pulled one forward. It came easily and contained a hat. She pulled the next. It was heavy and nearly fell through her hands. She carried it across the room to the desk, opened the box. A conglomeration. At first she thought it was jewelry, and saw that some of it was — a lot of medallions and a strange mix of pins and rings. She lifted a handful. The shapes matched a lot of the symbols on the stained glass in front of the house. Thunderbirds, Mayan suns, Stars of David, curious little fertility figures in clay. It looked like Justice collected religious symbols like some people collected stamps. A crucifix dangled, twisted in with strings and leather thongs. The little cross and its figure of silver and gold was tangled around the string of a pierced, ancient coin.

  Amy plucked and separated, finally got it free. She kissed it, hung it around her neck. Familiar feel in her fingers as she touched it. Her hand fell away from the crucifix, then came back. Such a small thing to give such tranquility.

  All right, she could stop being superficial now. She could
quit thinking easy thoughts about people. Now that she was safe she could face the truth.

  A force had led her to that well and made her kneel. It didn’t feel unfriendly, although it was certainly compelling. Abruptly she felt for the familiar contours of the crucifix, which she believed stood between her and this house. When she went to the well she was under so much stress that she really could not blame herself. John would not blame her. When she was compelled to kneel, compelled to look, she also felt youth wash over her. She felt the possibility of youth. A quiet assurance of dreams coming true. It was like this force was making a promise to her.

  She shrugged. Only the promise of a promise. She wasn’t sure how she felt about it now, but she understood her reasons and feelings then.

  She fondled the crucifix. Listened. Only silence. The experience in the subcellar had been beyond belief, except so much in this house was beyond belief, old-time belief, that the incredible got to be almost the normal. It was upside down, and it wore a person out just to think about it. She stood and stretched. You had to trust somebody, or something — and this small emblem was something to trust.

  She lay on the bed with the crucifix lying openly on her shirt front. No evil would come past that. None could. She’d learned that, at least.

  Yet, as she eased into sleep in this small place that had been designed as a sanctuary, it seemed in either dream or memory or imagination that there was a flurry, a rushing outside the vault that surrounded Justice’s room.

  Above the room the house rose towering into scudding snow clouds, and lay foundationed and rooted in the substrata of rock. Wrapped in arctic cold, its weather-beaten symbols scowled into the wind…

  A murmur, a mist. Grayness hung in the halls. Whispers, like cold breath, were in the rooms. Slight movement puzzled its way through the house. A small, silent explosion of dislodged dust fell from dark rafters, invisible in the darkness. Scuriying feet, their sounds tumbling toward the center of the house — the well.

  Confrontation. Of force against force. Faint blue light and green light coalesced, grew more brilliant, finally luminous. The light pulsed, was charged as it first drifted toward the center of the house, flowed slowly and then more quickly through the halls and down the staircases, flowed by the infernal machinery like a surreal brook running across a battlefield. The light built in the cellar, flowed to the subcellar, past the corpse of Theophilus, which hung like portraiture. The darkness increased as the light arrived, the merely dark from the dead generators — the natural darhness — gave way to black before the merged green and blue light, which now gave over its pulsating force to the low throb that built around the central well, the growing well of darkness.

  Hear it come. Smell it come. Movement through hours and days, and centuries. Into the pit. Through all the halls and rooms, carrying in airy hands the remains of Vera Tracker, skull pierced, bones dry, mouth lankly open as if for a last curse. Past generations of ritual death, of symbolistic murder in the service of greed and superstition…the last rites chanted over intelligence.

  It rose slowly from the pit, at first all but formless, gathering strength as it gathered substance. A half-blown image, like broken volcanic slag. The form increased, faded, then concentrated…to the accompaniment of the heavy clunk of gold, or the tossing curls of a thousand flags, a raised fist above them, and oil slicks and burning bodies on a torpedo-rolled sea; the splash of man-thrown fire against green hillsides; the whoosh of rockets and the tatting of drums…

  It shaped, formed, reshaped. It grew wings and beat the blackness, then sunk into a coil and hissed. It became a rat, erupting from the coil to climb a supporting beam, darting in the blackness, tumbling in pain, becoming a many-legged thing that descended on a web. The form faded, grew stronger.

  It emerged. At first it was compact, cold like frozen tundra, so intensely black that it suctioned the natural dark. It stood in the dark, a radiance of black. It struggled for form, got it, held it vaguely. It grew. It was launched. A pale mouth and pale, washed blue eyes. A mist that might be hair. The figure appeared above the constructing forces of the pit, seemed to shrug misshapen shoulders, tested awkward legs, and walked.

  Chapter Nineteen

  On the crosshatched grid of light and darkness that is Tracker history, there are occasional streams of pure light. Justice Tracker, John’s father, died of dehydration in his sanctuary. Theophilus sealed Justice in that sanctuary because, after Vera’s death, Theophilus was profoundly afraid. He spoke to Vera’s corpse, and its animating force, the force of the evil of this house, and beyond, answered. Or perhaps Theophilus’ crazed fear caused him to answer himself. But if so, what of John Tracker and Amy? They too imagined — were made to imagine?

  The important work of Justice’s life was not his summary, on which he spent his last days and which was too hastily written. His masterwork is the sum of his journals. Because they still exist, his life is almost completely known; his sorrows are recorded, as are his appreciation of the tracery of sunlight through arbors. He writes of music heard and not forgotten, of the intimate and knowing smile of a beloved woman. Failing in life to succeed with the mind and spirits of others, he left his own mind and spirit standing like an intricately worked and beautiful tower. The tower has weak masonry in places, but it is still the sanest production of the house of the Trackers.

  Raised in a tradition of violence, Justice became the antithesis of it. Rebellion for him amounted to silent study. He early learned to tell the difference between truths that were told as lies, lies told as truths, and truths told as truths. He developed perfect pitch for lies, which would keep him quiet and working for years.

  The failure of his marriage caused sorrow that turned to romantic sadness. Justice was not original in his view of women; was, in fact, a fool about the matter, and there is every indication that he knew it. During the few years when he was teacher to his young son John he was overprotective on all but one occasion. Considering where they lived, and who with, protectiveness was understandable.

  To go, or to stay? That question occupies his early middle years. The growing anti-human presence that dwelled in the house of the Trackers was also silent and subtle in its beginnings. Justice, so interested in his own theories, was shocked when he finally understood what was happening.

  He did want to leave, and could not. He gets no name for bravery because of this. It appears (being who he was) that he had no choice. It would always be his lot to have peaceable yearnings while living through one battle after another. The evil that grew in the house of the Trackers found its opposition in him, and finally grew beyond him. It was strong enough, because of his death, to make incursions into the countryside.

  Justice’s conclusions are unremarkable. He believed that good and evil are not in active conflict. Sometimes when in motion they collide. He believed that time is eternal, but not linear, that it moved back and forth and overlapped itself. He believed that power was different from force, and that the one ruling power in the universe was nature. Hell, and its various replicas, distorted nature, and the world he knew detested nature. Justice believed there were only two real sins: pride and ignorance. He did not believe in original sin. He believed in the possibility of original good.

  It was not a matter of cutting losses, it was a matter of consolidating his position. He had to get Amy away from the house. As long as she was a hostage they were both vulnerable. As long as he had to deal with another opinion, another physical presence, another set of movements, he could not control the action on his own end. His only chance was to make this situation one to one. He and Amy could not leave together.

  He knew what he had learned. Parts of this house, its tradition, were a part of him. He was bound as surely to this house as was Justice, as was the dangling corpse of Theophilus.

  He felt the texture of silence in the house, remembered the muffled silence in Justice’s roo
m, then that first silence when he first encountered Vera.

  Vera. When he was little, Vera did not have much time for him. Still, thinking back on it, he could remember no act of Vera’s that actually tried to hurt him. There were plenty of painful words, which was a special kind of hurt. She was a master of the spirit but she had not, like Theophilus, dumped him down a well, or killed his dog, or done anything else that would be terrible in the world of a child.

  He sat wondering if Vera was all right. He did not know if in shooting her he had committed a kind of murder, done nothing, or had done her a favor by making her seeming living death, death only.

  He was tired, and it was not the good fatigue from action. It was the fatigue of confronting the unspeakable, the unanswerable. It was the fatigue from walking the mile you had to walk that went beyond the mile you could walk.

  His mind, he decided, was telling him that it was time to act. “You want something. Stop sparring.” This deal was going to be bad enough. He had to open strong.

  He yawned, stood, and went for more coffee. He opened a can of fruit juice, some tinned meat, and searched on the shelves for crackers, then returned to the table and sat chewing the tasteless food.

  When the answer came it was from some far recess of the house. It trilled with the quality of an echo. It was, he thought, the kind of sound that the blue light in the sub-cellar would make if light were translated to sound.

  Silence. He stood, left the kitchens and walked through empty rooms, probing for the chink or cranny the trilling came from. He was drifting toward an entry he hoped would eventually bring him to the fourth floor.

  In this house, with its outrageous contrivances, what he hated only a little less than the well were the stairways. Stairways were tunnels that ran up or down. So they were not much different from wells. He stopped, listened, walked on. He found an entry and climbed to the second floor. This stairway truly was like a tunnel, running as it did beneath the broad set of carpeted steps, which were wide and open like an invitation. You could actually look up and see the underside of the main staircase. You also had to avoid what made the main staircase deadly. Not even Theophilus had ever used that main staircase.