Bellwether

by Jenny Ashford

  At last, he gave up, slamming the paintbrush down on the table. There were still three more weeks before the opening; maybe he could finish the thing tomorrow night or over the weekend. There was still plenty of time, he reassured himself. He was still annoyed, though, as he cleaned his brushes and wadded up the drop cloths. That stupid girl made him feel uncomfortably aroused, and hence, skeevy.

  After he put everything away and rinsed himself off in the shower, he padded downstairs to the kitchen to cut up a salad and get things ready for dinner. There was nothing to cook yet, but Chloe was out picking up groceries, and supper from the Italian place on the main road. Martin was looking forward to her coming home, even though his cheeks reddened when he thought of his shameful attraction to the young visitor. He pushed her image from his mind and concentrated on Chloe. He wanted to tell her about the strange man, before the others got home. Sometimes just talking to her about things made them seem less weird and upsetting. He wasn’t sure if he was going to tell her about the girl, though, at least not yet.

  It was almost dusk when he heard a car engine outside, and for the briefest second he pictured the gigantic powder-blue rust bucket cruising up the driveway, its windshield glinting under patterned sunlight. This time, though, the girl would be driving, her blonde curls blowing in the breeze, her skirt riding up on her thighs, so that you would almost be able to see…

  Martin shook himself. What the hell was the matter with him? The car rounded the house, and of course it was Chloe’s six-year-old Cavalier; Martin would know the grating whine of its engine anywhere. He listened as it screeched into the backyard and coughed to a halt, then he went to the back door, out onto the narrow wooden porch.

  Chloe was getting out of the Chevy, her red hair all shining flame under the riotous sunset. Martin thumped down the porch steps; they’d been rotten and splintery when they bought the place, but now the straight new boards shimmered softly, fastened with sparkling new nails. Martin had put them in himself, and he felt a twinge of pride as they held his weight with reassuring stability.

  He crossed the sandy backyard in his bare feet and kissed Chloe on the cheek. He helped her carry the groceries inside, but neither of them spoke a word other than “Hey.” She knew something was on his mind, but that he would only tell her when he was ready.

  As they put the things away, he told her about the man who had come to the door, leaving out the girl for now. He tried to make light of it, tried to make it sound like a delightfully strange anecdote, but Chloe knew the visit had freaked him out, and what’s more, Martin knew that she knew. He also knew that she suspected he was holding something back. This scared him a little, but in another way it made him feel warm and secure, knowing that someone was so aware of him. He would tell her later, when the incident had lost some of its luster.

  “The guy never asked to come inside?” Chloe said, shoving a carton of milk into the fridge.

  “No.” It had been on the tip of his tongue to say the man waited for Martin to ask him inside, but that wasn’t quite right. It was more like the man wanted to come inside, but had been afraid to. This was bizarre, but as soon as the thought occurred to Martin, it seemed correct. He told Chloe of his realization.

  She didn’t laugh or scoff. That was something else he’d always liked about her, besides her wide, intelligent eyes and her supple, sarcastic mouth — she knew when to be serious. She closed a cabinet door thoughtfully. “Do you suppose he used to live here? Or knew someone who used to live here?”

  Martin hadn’t thought of that, but after considering it for a few seconds he shook his head. “I think if that had been it, he would have just come out and said so without being all secretive. Besides, I thought the realtor told us that no one had really lived here for years.”

  Chloe leaned against the counter, her arms folded across her chest. A framed print of another dark-haired conjuror, this one salvaged from the attic, scowled from over her shoulder. “Well, maybe he’ll turn up when we open. Then he’ll be free to look around all he wants.”

  Martin frowned, even though he knew she was partly joking. The thought of the man, and that girl, in their house disturbed him more than he could rationally justify. “I hope he doesn’t,” he said.

  Just then, a thumping footstep on the back porch sounded through the kitchen, and a moment later, Ivan emerged through the back door, his cropped blond hair almost white under the harsh neon tubing. His worn guitar case was slung across his back; he worked at the music store up on the main road, and sometimes gave lessons in the afternoons. “Is it soup yet?” he said. His voice still held a trace of a Russian accent.

  About twenty minutes later, Olivia, the fourth member of their little collective, got home from her job at the coffee shop. They all sat down around the small kitchen table, since the dining room of the house had been commandeered for use as part of the art gallery, and talked animatedly about the upcoming opening and about how their days had gone. Martin brought up the subject of the strange visitor, again leaving the girl out, early in the conversation, and although the others were momentarily intrigued and had suggested some not-entirely-serious possibilities for the man’s motives, the talk naturally moved on to other topics, and Martin was secretly relieved.

  After a little while, he could tell himself that he’d nearly forgotten about the menacing man and the girl who had forced her deadly charms upon him, and about the two unmoving shadows that had watched him from behind the car windows.

  * * * *

  That night, in bed, Martin finally confessed about the bewitching girl on the porch. The sense of wrongness and arousal that the situation had caused were still very present, and he meant to wait a little longer, so he’d have more perspective, but blurted out all the details anyway. He stayed with Chloe for four years, and, at this point, telling her everything had become almost a reflex.

  She lay back against her pillows and listened, her expression not changing. Martin could tell he was hurting her a little, but he didn’t want to keep anything from her; it didn’t seem right, even if the whole thing were rather innocent, even though he counted himself as the victim of some strange hypnotic seduction attempt.

  There were a few moments of silence after he’d finished talking. Then a slow smile crept across Chloe’s face. “I’ll make you forget all about it,” she said, pushing him down on the mattress and climbing on top of him. He did forget for a while.

  Afterwards, as they lay sweaty and tangled in one another’s arms, Martin dozed off into a surprisingly easy sleep and then began having a dream.

  For as long as he and his friends had been living in and working on the house, he had never once got the impression that it was haunted, even when he was in it alone. He didn’t believe in those sorts of things anyway. The house was certainly old, and its aspect could be said to suggest the type of place where spirits glided regularly through the corridors, but Martin had always felt perfectly secure there, and had never seen the place as anything other than a once-lovely old house that needed some hard work so that it could be made lovely again. He knew the others felt the same; all four of them were pragmatists down to their toenails.

  In the dream he was having now, though, the house took on a bizarre dimension. He wasn’t sure if it was malevolent, but he definitely felt something, some force, or presence, surrounding and pressing down upon him.

  In the dream, the house looked much the same as when they first bought it. It was a little decrepit and run down, the white walls nearly gray with the collected grime of abandoned years, drooping cobwebs fluttering in every corner. Dusty artifacts were scattered carelessly about — large pairs of interlocked silver rings; gaily painted boxes of varying sizes, each with secret bottoms and sliding panels; faded prints and playbills advertising long-ago magic shows. Martin was alone in the house, as he’d been this afternoon, in reality. In the dream, his solitude seemed a natural situa
tion.

  The knocking began at the door, a soft gentle sound that could have been a friend, the meter reader, or the nice old lady down the street with a big plate of cookies in her hand, but certainly could not have been anyone dangerous, not with a knock like that.

  Still, though, Martin was reluctant to answer the summons. He tried to look out, to see who was knocking, but even though the windows were open, they were all opaque, as though a bright glare had blotted out the view. The knocking continued, still soft, but gradually heightening in intensity. As Martin listened, he realized it came not only from the door, but from the walls on either side of it. He became frightened then. Upon entering the dream, he initially felt disturbed by a presence inside the house, but he found he was exponentially more disturbed by the knocking presence outside, which he understood as a separate entity.

  Martin backed away from the useless windows, and the dream was so vivid that he could feel splinters from the worn floorboards as they insinuated themselves into the soles of his bare feet. The knocking was all around him now, the arrhythmic pounding of a thousand phantom fists, beating on the doors, the walls, and the windows, both upstairs and down. Martin put his hands to his ears to drown out the noise, but found, instead, that the knocking was amplified and seemed now to be coming from somewhere inside his skull.

  A compulsion—perhaps the spirit of the house imposing its will upon him?—began pushing at him, forcing him over toward the wall in the living room like a physical presence. He had no choice but to obey it, and then found that his hands were no longer his own, as something unseen seized them and placed them palms down upon the rough stucco just to one side of the sheet-covered sofa, which had been the only piece of furniture in the house when they’d bought the place.

  Then, the way one can teleport easily in dreams, he found himself in one of the upstairs bedrooms, the one that now belonged to Ivan and Olivia. His hands made contact with the wall there, too, and he felt an almost living vibration beneath his fingers, like the beating of a massive heart.

  In another bedroom used for storage, Martin’s hands rested upon the back wall of the walk-in closet, the house like a wood and concrete organism beneath his touch.

  Then, all of a sudden, he found himself racing through the dining room with its dust-coated chandelier—in reality, long since cleaned and replaced—and into the kitchen, his breath coming in great whoops. The bluish neon lights overhead blinked in time with the knocking from outside, which was already deafening and yet still somehow growing louder and louder, and on top of that, now he thought he could hear the heavy tread of many feet on the wooden risers of the back porch steps, and the sigh of many voices breathing as one.

  The presence surrounding him felt very strong now, too, seeming to increase analogous to the intensity of the activity outside, until its essence filled every molecule of space inside the house. It was still scary and powerful, but now Martin felt as though this inside presence was protecting him, or at least protecting the house from encroachment by the insistent outside forces.

  Martin jumped up the three steps to the first landing at the base of the main staircase. Again with the psychic certainty inherent in dreams, he was sure that running back upstairs would be a useless maneuver, and so, instead, he curled up on the landing, leaning his back against the dark paneled wall, drawing his knees up to his chest.

  The wall felt very warm against his skin, almost like living flesh. As soon his body made contact with the structure of the house, the knocking ceased. The house fell silent, as though listening. There was a pleasant, if musty, odor of old paper and candle wax in the air, and the only sound Martin could hear was a faraway, tinkling music, like the delicate ringing of a bell.

  Chapter Three

  Lily sat in a chair in an empty, dark room, her feet dangling a few inches from the floor. She could hear Father muttering out in the main part of the building, and a harsh rasp that might have been Mother replying. With a sigh, Lily glanced over at Rose, who was perched on a box, staring out of a tiny slit of a window that had a metal grate fastened over it. “What do you suppose we’re doing here?” Lily asked her sister.

  Rose didn’t turn, but only shrugged her shoulders. “Mother and Father know what’s best for us.”

  Lily shifted in her seat, scowling. She already knew that Mother and Father wanted the best for them. She knew she should keep her mouth shut and trust them, the way Rose did. She couldn’t help it; she was curious. Lily leaned against the chair back. She wasn’t bound to the chair, and the door to the storeroom was closed, but not locked. She could leave if she wanted to, and part of her did, but for now, she stayed put. Mother and Father would be very angry if she interrupted their conversation, which sounded as though it was becoming heated; and besides, she wanted to find out what the big plan was going to be, what the future would hold for her and her new family.

  They hadn’t been back to that house. After that first day, after they’d left the beautiful white house behind them, Father had been ominously silent, his face drawn up like a thundercloud. He was quick to snap at the girls, and walked on eggshells around the clearly sullen Mother. Lily didn’t know what had happened, but she suspected that part of the plan had gone awry. This disturbed her, as she’d always thought of Mother and Father—well, mostly Mother—as invincible forces whose divine will could not be thwarted. Obviously, something was wrong.

  The four of them stayed at the smaller hotel on the main road for three days. Mother spent most of the time brooding, staring out the window at the parking lot, occasionally consulting the pile of inscrutable books and papers she always carried with her in a green carpet bag. Father barely spoke a word, and just paced the room, smoking and looking worried, glancing at Mother every now and then and earning a swift, silent reprimand from her concealed, but still penetrating, gaze.

  For Lily, the days were pleasant, if a little boring. Rose mostly ignored her, but she was used to this, and it no longer bothered her much. Even before they’d met Mother and Father, Lily and Rose had never been close; the bulk of their conversations had revolved around their trapeze act, and when the circus was traveling, Rose would usually find company elsewhere. Lily had learned long ago that it was better to be alone; then there was no one around to make fun of her face, her twisted limbs; no one to befriend her solely because they felt sorry for her in her pitiful deformity.

  A few times over the three days, Lily had considered leaving the hotel room secretly and walking back to the wonderful house. It wasn’t that far, or at least it hadn’t seemed far when Father drove there. She would have liked to sit under the trees and feel the sun dappling her crooked features. Maybe the pretty dark-haired man who had answered the door that day would even come out and sit with her. Maybe he would see her for the person she was inside, rather than being repelled by her challenging exterior. She smiled and blushed at the thought, but then pushed it away. Mother and Father wouldn’t like it if she left the room without permission, and besides, who said that man was any different from any other man she’d ever met? It was all just silly fantasy. If Rose were to go sit outside the man’s house, then he would come out—even from a distance, Lily had seen the way he looked at her that day—but he wouldn’t do it for Lily, she was certain of that.

  She did wonder about that man, though. Was he the reason that Mother and Father’s plan had gone wrong? Was the house supposed to have been empty? She didn’t know, but she secretly hoped that Mother would not have to hurt the man. Lily had liked the look of his sculptured, friendly face, even though she’d only been able to see it from several yards away. She thought of his lovely face several times during the stint at the hotel, and she even dreamed about him a couple of times.

  After a few days, Mother shook off most of her torpor. She and Father went out one morning and didn’t come back until the sun almost disappeared behind the horizon. Rose had sat in front of the window all day,
watching for them, even forgetting to eat. Lily had tried to talk to her a few times, but gave up when she got no answers. The next day, Father piled everyone into the blue car, and though Lily was hopeful, he didn’t turn down the narrow road leading to the house. Instead, he headed east, only about a mile or so, and pulled into the massive parking lot of an ordinary, if slightly careworn, strip mall.

  Father led them down the covered sidewalks, Mother shuffling close behind him, and Lily straggling at the back of the group, staring into the windows of the shops as they passed—there was a music store, with many shiny guitars glistening behind the glass, a card shop, a liquor store, and a small clothing boutique. When Lily shaded her eyes and gazed out across the half-empty expanse of parking lot, she could see another set of perfectly mundane stores across the way—a coffee shop, a used bookstore, a newsstand. Lily felt her heart sinking just a little. This place held none of the magic of the white house in the woods—what were they even doing here?

  Mother and Father stopped walking. Lily stepped forward and looked through the front glass of the store they’d stopped in front of, but the place was empty, deserted. There was a metallic rattle, the sound of Father producing a set of keys from his pocket. Lily didn’t like to think what it meant that Father had keys to an empty storefront, but she followed along, trailing a few steps behind Rose, who was looking at the place in gaping wonder, as though it were the Sistine Chapel.