by Laird Hunt
To put such crazy thoughts to flight I would look at Arne’s last work. Yet I wavered, and more than once turned away after laying my hand on it. At last I snatched it, placed it on the easel and lighted the nearest gas-burner before looking at it. Then—great heavens! How had this vision come to Arne? It was the scene where Felipa cursed us. Every detail of the room reproduced, even the gay birds on the wallpaper, and her flowerpots. The figures and faces of Dering and Volz were true as hers, and in the figure with averted face which Arne had said kept its back to him, I knew—myself! What strange insight had he gained by looking at Felipa? It was like the man who trembled before the unknown portrait of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.
How long I gazed at the picture I do not know. I heard, without heeding, the doorbell ring and steps along the hall. Voices. Someone looking at rooms. The landlady, saying this room was to let, but unwilling to show it, forced to own its last tenant lay there dead. This seemed no shock to the stranger.
“Well,” said her shrill tones, “poor as he was he’s better dead than alive!”
The door opened as a well-known voice cried: “My God! say not that! The nerve which hears is last to die—”
Volz stood before me! Awe-struck, we looked at each other in silence. Then he waved his hand to and fro before his eyes.
“Is this a dream?” he said. “There,” pointing to the bed; “you”—to me; “the same words—the very room! Is it our fate?”
I pointed to the picture and to Arne. “The last work of this man, who thought it a fancy sketch?”
While Volz stood dumb and motionless before it, the landlady spoke:
“Then you know the place. Can you tell what ails it? There have been suicides in this room. No one prospers in the house. My cousin, who is a house-mover, warned me against taking it. He says before the store was put under it here it stood on Bush Street, and before that on Telegraph Hill.”
Volz clutched my arm. “It is The Flying Dutchman of a house!” he cried, and drew me fast downstairs and out into a dense fog which made the world seem a tale that was told, blotting out all but our two slanting forms, bent as by what poor Wynne would have called “a blast from hell,” hurrying blindly away. I heard the voice of Volz as if from afar: “The magnetic man is a spirit!”
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‘Home’ from Just an Ordinary Day by Shirley Jackson. US Copyright © 1997 by The Estate of Shirley Jackson. Used in the USA by permission of Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved. UK Copyright © Laurence Jackson Hyman, J.S. Holly, Sarah Hyman DeWitt and Barry Hyman, 1996.
‘Spunk’ by Zora Neale Hurston © The Zora Neale Hurston Trust
First published by Pushkin Press in 2019
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ISBN 13: 978–1–78227–596–1
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