House Next Door

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I don’t think you’re crazy and I don’t believe what you believe either. But I know that you do, and I can see what it’s cost you to believe it. I can respect that. I don’t give a shit about the People thing anymore. That’s over; you’ve said it’s pretty much died down. It shouldn’t have gotten to me that way. The best thing now is for you all to watch us live in it. See how happy we’re going to be. See what a good life the right people can have there. It will be a good life. And when you’ve watched us long enough, when there are kids running all over the place, and—oh, I don’t know—parties, and dogs and cats loping around, and good vibes to chase out the bad ones—then you won’t have to live with this godawful fear anymore, this sick waiting. You were brave to stay. Anybody else would have pulled out if they’d thought what you did. I know why you stayed. You’re good people. You’re my good friends. Let me show you now. Let me fix things for you.”

  I said, tiredly, infinitely tired, without hope, for the last time, “Take it off the market. Never sell it to anyone else. Pull it down. Don’t live in it. Don’t do that. After all, it’s only your first house. There’ll be others; you’ll build a thousand others—”

  I broke off. I heard his voice in my ears, but he wasn’t speaking. It was a younger Kim’s voice, and it was saying something about other buildings, buildings that weren’t finished. So long, it seemed so long ago…I remembered then, and something began to coil into my head like smoke, something white, something that could blind.

  “Kim,” I said, “once, a long time ago, when we’d just met you, you said something about having had two other projects while you were in school, but that they weren’t finished. What happened to them?”

  Walter glanced at me and then leaned forward toward Kim, bright interest radiating from him.

  Kim looked at both of us, helpless distress and puzzlement lifting the bristling red eyebrows. “They were just two projects that never got off the ground,” he said. “Why?”

  “No reason,” Walter said chattily. “Just curious.”

  “Well, one was a design competition, a fancy international thing with a fat cash prize,” Kim said. “A winter sports arena outside Gstaad. The winning design was to be built. My faculty adviser—God, he was absolutely convinced my design would win. I think it would have too. He’d never had a winner; he was walking on air. He wanted that prize more than anything—” He stopped and looked at Walter.

  “What happened?” Walter said.

  “He had a heart attack and died the day I turned it in to him. We—I didn’t submit it. It was more his than mine, really; it didn’t seem right—”

  “And the other one?” Walter said gently. They might have just met, been exchanging small, personal histories over drinks. I listened, the white thing swelling in my head.

  “A studio for a photographer. I was in school then too, but it wasn’t a school project. He was a Life photographer, a real hotshot. Friend of the old man’s. He’d always liked my work.”

  The question burned vividly in Walter’s eyes; they were leaping with a sort of life I had not seen for a long time. A sort of social merriness, inviting comradeship and confidences. But he did not say anything.

  Kim answered the eyes slowly. “There was an accident on the site while we were pouring the foundation. A freaky, one-in-a-million kind of thing. He was—he was blinded. It wasn’t finished; a blind photographer doesn’t need a studio.”

  I could not tell if the last words were bitter or an attempt at bravado. There was another silence, during which the blinding white thing in my head burst soundlessly and rang in my ears. In the ringing white silence I heard Kim say in an astoundingly normal voice, “Both things were accidents of course. Awful, but you can’t afford to let things like that slow you down. Every architect gets one or two like that. Thank God, I’ve gotten my quota over with early.” He grimaced with distaste.

  “I think we all need another drink,” I said and got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen. I got out ice and rattled it in the ice bucket. I heard the conversation begin again, Walter and Kim’s voices mingling in low, pleasant tones, and the stereo needle scratching abruptly onto a record. The overture from Company swam out into the kitchen.

  “Walter,” I called, “can you give me a hand in here for a minute?”

  We stood together in the kitchen. I looked at him. The preternatural life still burned in his eyes.

  “It’s not just in the house,” I said, “it’s in him first. In Kim. That’s where it starts. It was born in him. He’s a carrier, some kind of terrible carrier, and he doesn’t even know it. It will be in everything he ever builds for as long as he lives, and he’ll never know it.”

  Walter looked at me mildly. His words were brisk and reasonable and senseless.

  “Don’t be silly, Colquitt,” he said. “He’s no goddamned vampire carrying the family curse down through the generations. We know all about his family; they’re good people, substantial people, wealthy—celebrities even, in a minor way. If there was anything like that in his family, don’t you think somebody would know about it?”

  “They’re not his family,” I said. “Don’t you remember? He’s adopted. He doesn’t know who his parents are.”

  We stared at each other. I watched as the life wavered and ebbed out of his eyes. He nodded finally. When he spoke, his voice and his eyes and words were perfectly, endlessly flat, as flat as the misted place where a hot summer sea meets the sky.

  “Okay,” he said. “Call him in here. Just give me a minute.”

  27

  IT IS VERY LATE. From the position of the moon, I’d say it was past midnight at least. We have been sitting on the patio for quite a long time; I do not know how long. We sit in the two white wrought-iron chairs that we sat in the day the People photographer came. Our hands are clasped between the two chairs; occasionally one of us will swing our joined hands and the other will give back a small squeeze. It is very quiet, except for the song of the katydids in the trees and the liquid trill of the diminished creek where it goes over the small waterfall in its bed next door. Hot summer sounds, both.

  We have said very little while we sit here. Once Walter said, “I think you were the prettiest thing I ever saw when I first met you. You had on a white dress made out of some thin kind of stuff, and about a million crinolines. You had a gardenia in your hair, of all goddamned corny things. Do you still have that dress?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I gave it to Goodwill a thousand years ago. You idiot. What would I be doing with a white voile dress and all those crinolines?”

  There are only a few lights on the street now. Since it is a weekend night, they will burn later than usual. I am uneasy about that. But it cannot be helped. We must wait until they all go out, and then wait at least another hour after that. The fire must get that much start anyway. I wonder who will see it first? With the Guthries gone, it will probably be the Jenningses, across the street and down a little way. That will be all right. Their bedrooms are in the back of the house, and it will be a while before they notice.

  I hope we have not waited too long. Already it is reaching out across the rhododendron hedge. Already it has fingered here, and searched, and found. The bodies of Razz and Foster lie in the basement of the house next door; we found them on the deck, unmarked, looking at us open-eyed and waiting as they did in life, when we took Kim’s body there earlier, and carried it between us down the basement stairs. We did not have to break a window after all. I remembered that I still had the spare key that Anita Sheehan had given me.

  They are all three there now in the basement, at the foot of the stairs, beside the pile of newspapers and kindling, and the yellowed drifts of desiccated old sheer curtains I found in our attic, and the cans of lawn-mower gasoline that Walter took there earlier. We carried the cats down last. We made several trips; in the dark, being very quiet, it took us a long time. It is there, in the basement, that the fire will start, though not yet.


  But we cannot wait much longer. It will not wait. I hope there will be time.

  The last of the lights are going out now. The Jenningses’; one by one, darkness climbing the stairs. They are going to bed. Only the Parsonses’ lights are left. Walter holds my hand. The stars are clean and old. The creek chuckles a thousand soft secrets. The air is still; tomorrow will be hot.

  I wonder how it will happen.

  Epilogue

  LIGHT FROM A HANGING copper lamp spilled down onto a round oak table, and the girl pushed back a cup and saucer to make room for the drawings unrolled there amid the clutter of a small dinner party.

  “Get that edge over there, will you, Peter?” she said to her husband. The young man reached over and pinned a curling edge of tracing paper down with his flattened hand. The paper was rather brittle; flecks powdered the tabletop. The other couple leaned over the girl’s shoulder to look. The female guest gasped, a small, soft, involuntary sound of pure pleasure, and the girl lifted her face to her friends and smiled radiantly. The last of November’s leaves scratched and rattled at the window of the dining ell in the small apartment.

  “Isn’t it super?” said the girl. “It’s just exactly what I’ve always wanted, right down to the ground. I didn’t even know exactly what I wanted until I saw it, and then that was just it. Even with all the looking we’ve done, we’d never have thought of building a house if these plans hadn’t just fallen into our hands. We got them from this young architect Peter knows; his partner did them, oh, some time ago, I guess, when he was in Europe. I don’t know who he is—or was; Peter’s friend said he died not long ago. Isn’t that awful? The guy didn’t say how, and since it was so recent, we didn’t want to ask.

  “Anyway, this Frank somebody, Peter’s friend, said when he heard Peter talking about the house we’ve been looking for, he remembered these plans, and he dug them out of the files. I don’t know if the guy had ever done another house or not, but he would have been a dynamite architect if he’d lived. Just look at it. It looks like it’s growing right up out of the ground, doesn’t it?

  “It looks like it’s alive.”