The House on Parchment Street

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “Investigating antique stones,” he said finally. “It’s sort of archeology with a bit of geology thrown in. Like a fossil-hunt. We needed some chisels.”

  “Oh.”

  Uncle Harold came in. “What were you shouting? Oh—food. Good.” He took a sandwich and peered into it. “Peanut butter?”

  “Mine,” said Aunt Catherine, rescuing it. She gave him another. “Yours.”

  “Is this lunch, or a lesson in possessive pronouns?”

  The back door closed softly. Bruce passed them quickly, rather stiffly. Carol went out and joined him. He opened the cellar door quietly. She looked at what he was carrying.

  “Isn’t that a crowbar?”

  “Sh. I thought we might need it. I got some long files and a big screwdriver—they should reach.”

  Alexander joined them a few minutes later. They waited until the drilling started again, and then they worked steadily all afternoon. The mortar chips filled the space they had opened, and white dust filmed their faces when they tried to blow it out. They got in each other’s way and scraped mortar in each other’s hair, and the space around the stone grew deeper and deeper. It seemed to hang suspended in its place in a mortar of air. Alexander stopped finally, after a long silent attack. He rubbed his face on his sleeve, and sweat and dust made a paste on his shirt.

  “There’s an end to it somewhere. Everything has an end. I was thinking: when it finally becomes unglued, we should have something underneath it—cardboard or a thin board—so we can pull it out more easily. Preferably something on wheels. Though I don’t know yet how we’re going to lift it down, once we’ve got it loose.”

  Bruce looked around vaguely. His face was a stiff white mask. “I’ll flatten one of Mrs. Brewster’s book boxes.” He dropped his tools and stretched. Carol sat down on the floor and leaned her head against the stones. The drilling sounded monotonous and familiar as the buzzing of an insect. Bruce began to unpack one of the boxes beneath the table, his hands moving as though he were half-asleep. The church bells tolled the hour.

  “Four o’clock,” Alexander said. He yawned. “Four hours without a—” His voice stopped. They heard the clink of his tools on the stone.

  A man stood beside him with a drawn sword in his hand. His head turned as though he had heard a sound; his grim eyes rested briefly on Alexander’s face. Alexander stared back at him, expressionless, motionless. Then, an instant before the man turned toward him, he jerked himself away in one quick turn. The man passed through the stones where he had stood.

  “You saw him—” Carol whispered.

  Alexander sat down beside her. She heard the shaking of his breath. “He would have walked straight through me—through my private bones—” He ran his hands down his face. “Blimey, there’s another one—”

  The girl came toward him through the sunlight, her skirt whispering softly in the silence. She turned before she reached the stones and looked down at Alexander.

  “Edward. Come,” she said. And then she walked through the wall, her collar melting into the stone they had been chipping loose. As she passed, the front of the stone settled downward with a small decisive thud.

  Alexander closed his mouth. He looked at Carol wordlessly. Then he looked at Bruce.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m glad. When was the first time you saw them?”

  “Last winter, sometime after we moved in—I don’t remember exactly when—I saw the man. I didn’t wait to see the girl.”

  “And nobody else saw him until Carol came? Nobody knew he was there but you? You never told anyone?”

  “No.” He took a stack of books out of the box. He shrugged slightly. “I thought—I didn’t know what to think. Then Carol came and she saw him, too, and then finally we saw the girl, and things began to fall into place. And now you’ve seen her.”

  “And she’s seen me.”

  “It looked like it.”

  “I think,” Carol said, “she’s like you. She doesn’t trust older people.”

  Bruce took the last book out of the box. He got a penknife out of his pocket and began to cut down the corners. “It’s hard to know,” he said finally. He lifted his head. “Rot. The drilling stopped. I wanted to get that stone out today.”

  Alexander went to the wall. He probed at the mortar with a file. “It’s cracked, I think, but it’s still holding the stone. Maybe they’ll start drilling again.” He cleared a space on Mrs. Brewster’s table and sat on it, watching Bruce flatten the box. “All that time we were terrorizing the peaceful country town of Middleton on our bicycles, you were sneaking off on the sly seeing ghosts and drawing flowers. It’s amazing, what you don’t know about people…I wonder what Sandy Sparks does when he’s not being generally ugly. Or Roger Simmons, when he’s not crying. Do you suppose Sandy ever buys flowers for his mother?”

  Bruce grinned. “Not bloody likely.” He turned the box and started on another corner.

  “Or Carol,” Alexander said. “What do you suppose she does when nobody’s looking?”

  Bruce glanced at her. “She goes to bed with antique bed-warmers. And she hangs about a lot in trees. And she worries.”

  “How do you know?” Carol asked.

  “You bite your fingernails. I notice. You have nice hands. They have good bones. You should try worrying without biting your nails.”

  She looked down at them doubtfully. “It’s hard.”

  Bruce cut down the last corner. “What do you do when nobody’s looking, Alexander? Write poetry?”

  There was a small silence. “Me? The only sane member of the Middleton street gang?” He shifted on the table, and fragile glassware clinked together. There was a rich note of laughter in his voice. Bruce looked up at him. Alexander’s face was scarlet.

  Bruce slipped back on his heels. Alexander shifted again under his amazed stare, and a stack of saucers rattled warningly.

  “You don’t really. Do you, really?”

  “It—it comes to that, when you like—the way words sound. Please, if you’re going to laugh, get it over with so I can decide whether to throw a plate or just leave in dignity.”

  Bruce drew a deep breath. “I’m not going to laugh,” he said dazedly.

  “I don’t think it’s funny,” Carol said. “I wish I could do that instead of hanging in trees.”

  “You mean,” Bruce said, “when nobody’s looking, you sit down with a pen and put words together and make a poem? What do you write about?”

  “The same things you draw, I expect.” The flush was dying away from his face, but his voice was still unsteady. He picked up a china cat and examined it minutely. “That’s why—I expected you to know I wouldn’t ever have teased you about drawing. I don’t know why I expected you to know. Sometimes you expect people to read your mind. I thought perhaps your dad might have said something, but when I think about it, I know he wouldn’t.”

  “Wait—What has Dad got to do with it?”

  “He reads my poems.”

  “Dad?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s never—he never said—”

  “Of course not. I asked him not to tell anyone. I was afraid you’d laugh.” The corners of his mouth went up. “That’s why it’s so funny…your dad’s a good critic.”

  “I didn’t even know he liked poetry. It’s not—”

  “Factual.” He shrugged. “Perhaps he doesn’t. But he reads mine, when I’ve got something I think is good…I did an essay for one of his classes in a hurry. I wrote it on the back of one of my poems. He said the essay was terrible, but he liked the poem. So I’ve been sneaking poems to him ever since. It’s good to have someone else’s opinion.”

  Bruce pushed the sides of the box flat. Above him, the study floor creaked; he glanced up as though he could see Uncle Harold through the floorboards. Then he looked at Alexander again, sitting big and loose-limbed among Mrs. Brewster’s fragile glassware.

  “Poetry. Can I—can I rea
d some?”

  “If you want.” He looked toward the window. “I think they’ve stopped for the day. We’d better get the cardboard under the stone and clear out.”

  “Right.”

  The knuckles stood out white in Alexander’s hands as he shifted the stone upward. Bruce slid the cardboard underneath it and it settled again, gently tilted.

  “Let’s put some boxes in front of it to hide it,” Alexander said. “Oh. Your mother thinks we’ve gone fossil-hunting, in case she asks.”

  Bruce stared at him over a box of books. “Fossil-hunting? In Middleton? Why would she think that?”

  “I don’t know.” He took a box from Carol’s arms and added it to the stack in front of their work. “Perhaps it was something I said.”

  They drew the stone out the next morning after breaking through the rest of the mortar. They pulled the cardboard until the stone balanced delicately half-in, half-out of its place, and Bruce said, “Carol, move back in case we drop it.”

  She stepped back.

  “Steady—” Alexander breathed. They shifted it, breaking the balance, their hands splayed beneath the cardboard. The unexpected weight of it broke through their hands. They jerked away. The stone hit the floor with a dull, ponderous thud and cracked.

  Alexander closed his eyes. “How many toes have we got left among us?”

  Bruce stared upward. There was no sound from the study. Carol uncurled her bare toes. She looked at the hole they had made, and something in the unbroken darkness behind it drew her forward. She stepped on the stone and pushed her arm through the hole.

  “Bruce!”

  “Half a minute—Here’s the light—”

  She drew back; he flicked it on over her shoulder. They were silent as the light melted through the darkness, traced an arch across it. Then Bruce’s voice came, with a contentment she had never heard before in it, “Vaulted.”

  Alexander’s breath whispered slow next to Carol’s ear. An arch of stones ran before them into darkness over an earth floor.

  “It’s there,” Carol whispered. “It’s there. It was there all the time. It wasn’t a legend. It was really there.”

  “I wonder if it still goes to the church.”

  “Shouldn’t wonder,” Alexander murmured. “I feel small inside. Humble. You’ve answered a riddle nobody else could answer. I wish we could squeeze through the hole. I say, Bruce—”

  “What?”

  He hesitated, staring into the tunnel. “When—Are you going to tell your Dad, now? He’ll have to know, sometime.”

  “I know. So will Mrs. Brewster. I wish—”

  “I wish it could be a secret,” Carol said. Her voice was soft, muffled by the stone. “It’s so quiet…like a piece of another world. And if we tell people, the first thing they’ll say is—”

  “However did you know?” Bruce said. “And then we’ll get started on ghosts and Puritans and Madame Tussaud’s waxworks, and Dad will tell us nicely but firmly that we didn’t really see ghosts, which we did see. I think we found the tunnel, but we still haven’t quite answered the riddle, and I’d rather keep it quiet until then.”

  “Which riddle?”

  “Edward. Why the girl comes back at all. Why should she? What we should do is—”

  “Open the tunnel,” Carol said. “And the next time she says ‘Come’ we’ll come.”

  Alexander smiled. “Follow a ghost. Right. I’ve always wanted to, but I never knew it.” He drew another long slow breath. “Ghosts and a tunnel and a mystery. Such richness.”

  They worked straight through two more days. By the end of the third day there was a thin jagged hole in Mrs. Brewster’s cellar wall, almost big enough to squeeze through. They hid the hole, shoved the stones behind the table, and brushed themselves off, too weary even to speak. The house was empty when they went upstairs; Aunt Catherine and Uncle Harold had gone somewhere.

  “Tomorrow,” Bruce said. Alexander nodded, stifling a yawn. He went home. Carol went upstairs and washed the dust out of her hair. She brushed it dry beside her open window. Two long strips of the street next to the curbs were crumbled; they had begun to dig in one of them. The green truck was gone. She watched the sun slip behind the church spire, then behind the church. Then she saw Bruce come out with a wheelbarrow and hedge-clippers. He began to work slowly, letting the clippings fall heedlessly to the ground. He stopped once and looked down the long shaggy hedge that ran down the walk to the back of the house, where it curved upward into an arch that led to the side lawn. He yawned, scratching his head with the point of the clippers. Carol leaned back against the wall and watched him. The brush lay idle in her stiff aching hands. He blurred finally before her half-closed eyes, and she straightened, yawning, and began to brush again.

  “What on earth have you been doing?” Aunt Catherine said at dinner. “You’re both half-asleep in your plates.”

  Bruce blinked, stirring himself. “Oh. We—I’ve been showing Carol a piece of Middleton. We were at it longer than we expected.”

  “What part did you see, Carol?”

  She waved her hand vaguely. “That part across the field, where the farms are. I saw a bull. I’ve never seen one close before.” She yawned in spite of herself.

  Aunt Catherine looked at her, frowning a little. Then she said, “Well. A good night’s rest will cure you. You’ve been so quiet, lately. I hope you’re enjoying yourself.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  Uncle Harold cleared his throat. “I don’t mean to nag,” he said. “But there are dandelions all over the side lawn.”

  Bruce nodded. His hand lay lax around his milk glass, as though he were too tired to lift it. “I know. I’m sorry. I’ll get to it. Tomor—Tomorrow.”

  Alexander did not come the next morning. They worked on two final stones that jutted into the hole and stopped their passage. Bruce called his house at noon.

  “He’s not there,” he told Carol as they waited after lunch for the drilling to start again. “His mother sent him out to buy some new window-screens, and he came back and went again and she wanted to know where he was because he was supposed to put the screens in.”

  Carol wiggled her aching shoulders. “I wonder where he is.”

  “I hope he’s here by four.”

  They moved the final stone at three-thirty. Bruce sat down on one of them and brushed at his face. His hands shook. He smiled at her, and the dust cracked on his face like a mask.

  “I’m scared,” she said. “What if—Bruce, what if we go through the tunnel and there’s another century at the end of it. We’d be in the middle of a war.”

  “You can stay behind if you want. Then you can do all the explaining. What would you be—a Royalist or a Roundhead?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want to fight anybody. That’s why I never liked history. Every time you turn a page in a history book, there’s a different war going on.”

  “I know. But when—when two people can’t even keep from fighting, it’s hard to expect whole groups not to fight. But if that’s all people did, they wouldn’t be here still. They do other things. They build churches. Make wax statues. Write poetry, when nobody’s looking. They build houses and tunnels that last for centuries. They do quiet things.”

  The drilling, quiet while he spoke, started up again with a spurt of noise.

  “I wonder where Alexander is.”

  “Mm. Carol—”

  “What?”

  “Let’s go in the tunnel now. Then, when she comes, if she speaks to us while we’re there, we’ll know that she’s talking to us and not Edward.”

  “All right. You first.”

  He grinned, and disappeared halfway into the hole. The other half of him followed with a little maneuvering, and he vanished a moment. Then he rose and looked back at her, framed by stones. She giggled.

  “You look like you’re being walled in.”

  “Come on. Don’t forget the light.”

  She wiggled in. The earth was hard and damp un
der her feet. The stones were damp. They curved in a flawless, unbroken arch above her head. She looked back and saw the cellar room, bright against the dark stones, oddly unfamiliar, as though she were seeing it for the first time.

  “What time is it?”

  He flashed the light at his watch. “Three-forty. You don’t have to whisper.”

  “Neither do you.”

  The minutes dragged by in their silence. She stuck her fingers under her arms to warm them. Bruce’s eyes glinted in the light as he looked around. Far, far away, somewhere beyond the jagged hole, the drilling sounded, stopped, sounded again.

  “I wonder,” Carol whispered, “if that’s the way she sees the cellar. Or does she see it with somebody else’s things in it, or just empty…” A great black shape entered the hole as she looked, and the breath wailed from her. “Bruce—” The light danced as she caught his arm.

  “Let go—” He steadied the light. A pair of golden eyes flashed at him and he laughed. “That cat—Throw it back out—”

  She reached for it, but it flattened itself beneath her hands and vanished into the shadows.

  “Oh, well. Was it Emily’s cat?”

  “No. It was that black cat…” Her mouth felt dry. “I think…Bruce, turn around.”

  He turned. The man walked toward them down the tunnel, his footsteps soft, steady on the earth. The light winked off his sword. Bruce swallowed. He shifted aside; the man passed between them without a glance. They saw as he passed through the stones, the sunlight on the back of his black cape, on the broad brim of his hat. He stood just beyond the stones, listening, his head turning faintly in the direction of some sound. He turned finally and came back through the stones, and as he passed them his stride quickened. Bruce held the light on him until he reached the edges of it and the shadows enveloped him. Even then they could hear the soft beat of his steps. Bruce turned back. The girl came toward them through the sunlight. They saw her face through the hole in the stones. She turned briefly before she entered, and they heard her voice.

  “Edward. Come.”

  And suddenly they were no longer looking through a jagged hole, but through an arch of stone. A man, his head turned away from them as he looked back through the cellar, smiled briefly at her smile, and wax rolled down his fingers from the candle in his hand.