“Wait a minute, I want to tell you what the police said—”
“Well, I don’t want to hear it. You wallow in it, Eloise. It’s your natural milieu.” I turned and wheeled the cart toward the check-out counter, not waiting for Walter.
“What’s the matter, Colquitt?” she shouted after me, her voice strident with outrage. “You think the ghosts are going to come over there and get you too?” Heads swiveled after me. I could feel the eyes in the small of my back.
“Damned harpy,” Walter muttered in the car on the way home, but there was little heat in his voice. “We’re probably going to get a lot more of that, you know. Is it going to bother you too much?”
“Not in the least,” I said.
25
WE WENT TOGETHER to Chick Herren. Walter called first, and Chick was waiting for us in his corner office in the newspaper building downtown, his feet propped up on the elderly rolltop desk he had salvaged from the old building. He grinned a friendly greeting, but there were questions behind his sharp blue eyes.
“What brings you two downtown on a school day?” he said when we had seated ourselves on the sagging couch across from his desk. “A scandal among the advertising fauna? A hot tip on a new lipstick?” Like most newsmen, Chick suffers advertising and public relations people with offhand indulgence.
“It’s important, Chick,” Walter said formally.
“It better be. I’ve got old man Thornton and his crazy sister waiting for me in the board room, probably all ready to sign over half their stock to that half-wit nephew.”
“It is.”
Carefully, clearly, logically, and coldly, Walter spelled it all out for Chick Herren. He began with the murdered animals, the scene in the Harralsons’ bedroom, her father’s death. He fitted in the withering of Kim’s talent and his flight to Europe. He told of the Sheehans and their history before they came, of Anita’s shock at seeing Duck Swanson, the television movie, the telephone call. He did not, of course, mention the incident with us and Kim Dougherty or the one with Buck and Virginia Guthrie, and I could see clearly, hearing it all so precisely and unemotionally like this for the first time, in sequence, what gaping holes in the fabric of slowly building terror the missing incidents left. But we had agreed.
He moved on to the Greenes and told of the child’s illness, the ludicrous mingling of pity, embarrassment, and horror of that first party. He finished with the unmailed invitations to the second one, and the final blind rage that had led to the shootings, though he did not mention what Claire had told us about Melissa’s illegitimacy. We had agreed about that too.
He did not elaborate on Claire and Roger’s trouble and their fears and their move, but he did say that something else pretty terrible had happened to neighbors who had had contact with the house, and that they had moved away and were unwilling to talk about it. I knew that Chick would know whom we meant.
Walter’s even voice brought them all vividly before me again, the Harralsons and the Sheehans and the Greenes; they breathed and walked in the room, their quirks and vulnerabilities, their pains and weaknesses, the tools with which the house had destroyed them, so clear as to be almost palpable. We had rehearsed what we would say and how we would make our presentations, but I felt a wondering admiration at Walter’s skill and clarity. I had never seen him make a new business presentation for the agency, but I understood then why Charlie Satterfield said he was the best in the business at it. The horror hung there in the air, whole and living.
“In short, Chick, we feel that it would be fatal for anyone else to occupy that house,” he finished. “We’re not sensation seekers; you know that, of course. But we cannot sit by and let anything else happen over there. If we could afford it, we’d buy it ourselves and tear it down. I’m trying to locate Greene’s next-of-kin or whoever owns it now, and I plan to call them and tell them just what I’ve told you. I’ll go there and talk to them if it’s necessary. The house must not sell again.
“We don’t pretend to understand what it is over there; we can’t explain it. We think that it operates by isolating the…the most important things in people’s lives, their vulnerabilities, and turning them around and using them to destroy. We think it needs that sort of primal vitality for sustenance. And it has killed now. It won’t stop short of anything else next time. We feel that people must be warned. There doesn’t seem to be anyone else to do it except us. We know the risks we’re running; not a few people in town already think we’re playing with half-full decks, to put it mildly. That’s why we came to you. I can understand why we wouldn’t be believed, but a public warning, printed as straight news coverage in a reputable medium—”
He stopped. Chick Herren was looking at us intently, without expression.
“That’s it,” said Walter. “That’s all. I can’t do it any better than that.”
Chick swiveled his chair around and stared out the window, whistling tunelessly. He waited. He turned around again.
“Walter,” he said. “Colquitt. I can’t print that. The thing with the Greenes, that last thing, the shooting—yes. That’s news, unsavory as it is. And we did carry it. The other things—they’re explainable in a terrible kind of way, aren’t they? Products of the weaknesses, the flaws in those people. I know they happened; I’ve no quarrel with that. I know you’re not liars or sensation seekers; you know I know it. But they’re not news. And what it all adds up to, what you think it adds up to—a malignant house, a haunted house, if you will—that’s Halloween stuff at best. It’s a nasty story; the hair stood up on my neck listening to you. But it is a story; any of it, all of it could be put down to coincidence, grisly and one-in-a-million as it is. Don’t you see that? It’s too awful even to make a feature of. We have run features on haunted houses, but they’re Robert Louis Stevenson stuff—a ghost in crinolines flapping around an old antebellum wreck, a place where somebody’s crazy old great-great-grandpa stomps around scaring shit out of whoever sleeps in the Blue Room, or whatever. And we ran those practically over my dead body. This isn’t funny. It’s—unspeakable. I can understand how you might think what you do, living so closely with it, watching it all happen bit by bit—but I can’t print it. We’d be laughed out of business.” His face was seamed with concern and distress; his whole body was bent forward with it. Chick is a thoroughly nice man.
“What if something else happens over there?” I said. “What if it does go back on the market, and somebody does buy it, and they…die?”
“We could report the deaths. And that’s all I could do, or anybody else, I guess. I’m sorry, Colquitt. I really am. Even if I did run it, old Thornton would print a retraction the next day and fire my ass. I just can’t help you.”
“Do you believe us?” Walter asked.
“I—don’t know. I believe you sincerely believe it. That must be all you can handle on your plates right now. My whole life is facts, Walter. It’s what I live by, for better or worse. Sometimes I think we news people shut ourselves off from half there is to this existence—‘there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio’—but there it is. I don’t know if what you say is true or not, but I do know that I simply cannot help you, and couldn’t if I flat out knew it was true. I’m really sorry. It must have been a year of hell for both of you.”
“What do you think we ought to do, then? We’re not going to stop with you, you know,” said Walter. “We’re going to the television and radio stations next. And we’ll find somewhere else to go if those fall through.”
Chick sighed. “I wonder if you know what you’re letting yourselves in for? What life is going to be like for you if you spread this stuff around?”
“We pretty well know,” Walter said. “We’re getting some of it already. Don’t you see, Chick? It just can’t matter. This could go on and on—we can’t just sit over there and watch it keep killing and destroying.”
“Have you thought about moving? If I felt the way you two do, I’d move in a minute. Like those neighbors of yours. J
ust get out.”
“Who would there be to stop it then, Chick?” I said.
He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Who, indeed,” he said. “Okay, I guess if I were you, I’d do the same thing you’re doing. Go ahead and go to the stations. I don’t think you’ll get anywhere, but one of the whacko ones might give you some feature time. Talk to Ernest Lipschutz at KMO; I’d say he’s your best bet. I really think the best thing to do is find whoever inherited it and see if you can convince him not to put it back on the market. That, or burn the damned thing down.”
Walter laughed mirthlessly. “Don’t think it hasn’t occurred to us.”
We rose to go, and he walked with us to the elevator. “Be careful, you two,” he said abruptly as the doors began to close. He was still looking after us, his face troubled, when they slid shut and we started noiselessly down toward the street.
We got much the same reception from Howard Ogletree at the afternoon daily. Since both papers are owned by the same communications group, we might have guessed that we would.
We saw the general managers of two of the network television affiliates the next day. The first, a civic legend with more awards and plaques and public-service trophies than Bob Hope, fidgeted unhappily in his bescrolled office and slid sheering glances at his telephone, obviously hoping he could reach it and summon aid should we become totally irrational.
“I don’t think it would be in the public’s best interest to disclose this—this theory of yours, Walter,” he said carefully. “This station’s reputation has been painstakingly built, over the years, on the foundation of service to the community—”
“Morris,” Walter said tiredly, “that’s what we’re trying to do.”
But it was no use, and we went away, leaving him regarding his citadel as though the walls had turned to some sort of extraterrestrial jelly and betrayed him.
Clark Massengale, the manager of the CBS affiliate, was more sympathetic and blunter. “I can’t touch it,” he said when we had gone through our paces once again. “Morris Leonard called me a while ago, right after you left his office, and I thought he was going into cardiac arrest on the telephone.”
“What could it hurt, Clark?” I asked. “If it’s really so unbelievable, then what’s the harm in it? And if even a few people did believe it, we’d be that much to the good.”
“For starters, it could hurt the station pretty badly,” he said. “Our credibility would be zilch overnight.”
He did not seem to disbelieve us or think we had some sensational axe to grind or even seem to suspect that we were mildly demented. I suppose most newsmen are beyond surprise. He simply wasn’t going to help us.
We almost did not go to talk with Ernest Lipschutz at KMO. He is a newcomer to the city, a pale, finger-snapping, ferret-minded man brought in to shore up the station’s sagging ratings. He speaks in terms of packaging images, marketing news, audience awareness. The unhappy news teams wear wire-rimmed glasses and station blazers and chortle vibrantly over transit strikes and consumer ripoffs and the weather. But in the end we did go, and he listened to us with rapt intensity and watched us with measuring eyes.
When we were finished he said, “Can you guarantee me an exclusive?”
“I don’t follow you,” Walter said mildly. I knew he did.
“Would you sign an agreement not to talk to any of the other media about it? It has possibilities—we could develop it pretty nicely, I think. Maybe the two of you out in front of it telling your story, some interviews with neighbors—you know the sort of thing. Maybe even a tour of the house if we could get permission—show where all those things happened, and so on. What about those first two families, the ones who lived in it before the Greenes? Could you put me in touch with them? We could afford a little something for everybody who’d agree to appear. Not much, but—”
“Shove it, Lipschutz,” Walter said conversationally. The two telling white furrows bracketed his mouth. He rose and pushed back his chair.
Ernest Lipschutz leaned forward and smiled. “How much are you asking, Kennedy?” he said.
I pulled Walter out of the office before the chair he overturned hit the carpet.
The spring came early; a hot, dry April brought the dogwood and azaleas flooding into full bloom and ebbing out again within a week, leaving shriveling brown lace against the new green. We dug up beds, set out bedding plants, mowed and raked and mulched and fertilized. Without the Swanson boys on weekends, the yard work expanded to fill most of our free time. We did it slowly and thoroughly and with absorbed relish. We did little else. With Claire and Roger gone, and the Guthries, the street seemed as silent and lifeless as though it lay under deep snow. In the soft, fruity air of April, under the tender new blue of the sky, it was as disturbing and out of context as a ghost street. Women did not seem to go often on their morning rounds to grocery stores and hairdressers and meetings, though I might not have noticed if they had.
I was spending a lot of time in my office, submerging myself in the swelling spring tide of promotions and projects. There was a new formality between my clients and me now; they did not come so often to my office. We met, then, in their offices, and business was done, and there was no lingering over coffee or five-o’clock drinks. I was not surprised. I knew the talk had reached them, but still not sufficiently so that they were forced to acknowledge it, at least to me. We saw few of our friends; that did not surprise me either. I did not think that they had dropped us yet. Rather, they would wait to see what we would do next. We might still be taken back into the circle if we remained quiet.
We went seldom to the club for lunch or tennis, preferring to work in the yard and garden. I honestly do not believe we felt constrained about encountering them, those pleasant people we had known for so many years. It was rather that reality lay then in the two of us and in our house and lawn and gardens. And in the new purpose that bound and dominated us even when it lay iceberglike beneath our surfaces. Like old ice, it did not chafe with the waiting. Everything else was as pale and bleached and faded as images in an old photograph.
The house next door stood silent and empty and beautiful in the green shadows of the awakening trees. Grass grew tall and rich. Birds sang enchantingly in the woods behind it. The creek sang and shouted between its ferns in the brief, hard rains.
In the middle of April Walter called Dr. Holderbein at City College and got the name of Norman Greene’s brother in Boston and placed a long-distance call to him. I was in the den leafing through a hoarded pile of Smithsonian magazines, and listened detachedly as he worked with infinite patience once again through the story we had told so often during the last weeks. I thought once more how lucid, how beautifully constructed, how tightly knit and infinitely reasonable it sounded. I also thought, for the first time, that it did not sound sane. Walter talked for a long time, and then there was a brief silence, and he replaced the receiver carefully in its cradle and came into the den.
“What did he say?” I asked, knowing.
“He said I was a goddamned ghoul, and he threatened to sue me if he heard another word out of me, and he slammed down the phone.”
“Is he going to put it back on the market?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t get a chance to ask him. Colquitt, have you ever thought we might be…mad? Just insane, and not know it? They say you never know it if you are.”
“I’ve thought about it,” I said. “I just now thought it when I heard you talking to him. I suppose we could be. It could be…the start of what it’s going to do to us. But I don’t think so, Walter, because that isn’t what’s best about us. I don’t give a flip about my sanity, or lack of it, if it doesn’t isolate me from you. No. We’re not insane. Don’t you see? That’s too clumsy. It’s cleverer than that; it doesn’t misread people. That wouldn’t separate us, destroy us.”
“It could if we both ended up in the funny farm.”
“No. That’s not enough. It wouldn’t stop with that, a
fter the Greenes. It wouldn’t…drop back.”
“What do you think it will do to us, then?” Walter said, and for a blazing instant the bell jar lifted and I was aghast and terrified and utterly astounded once again at these words we were speaking to each other in this quiet, sunny room. But then the dome slipped back into place and the whirling void was gone.
“I don’t know. Nothing, probably, if we can’t succeed in doing anything to thwart it. If we leave it alone. If we don’t—your guess is as good as mine. You know what it almost did once.”
“Well, we’re batting zero so far,” he said. “What’s next, do you think?”
“Wait,” I said peacefully. “Wait and see. We’ve done all we can for now. It still isn’t on the market. Maybe it won’t be. If it does go up again, then of course we’ll have to do something else.”
“Yes,” he said. “There are other things. Listen, you want to go see the new Woody Allen movie?”
The next week Walter and Charlie and two or three of their young creative staff flew down to the South Carolina coast to make a new business presentation to a carefully rustic new resort that had sprung, full-blown, from the deep forest and scrub palm of that gentle, tawny shore. They had been invited to make the presentation, and I knew that hopes for it ran high at Kennedy and Satterfield. It would add in excess of a million dollars to the agency’s billing. They had worked on it for months, and advance intelligence had it that they were a virtual shoo-in, that the presentation was a mere formality. They were to be gone two days.
When the phone rang at nine o’clock on the first evening he was gone, I was surprised to hear his voice.
“Where are you?” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be plying the brass with their own liquor tonight?”
“I’m at the cottage,” he said.
“The cottage?”
“Our place, on St. Agnes. We wound up faster than we thought, and I thought a day or two down here would not be amiss, seeing as how we’ve all busted our asses on this thing for so long. I rented a car and drove down. Why don’t you get the noon plane down tomorrow, and we’ll fly back Sunday?”
House Next Door Page 27
